Three fatal airline accidents happened within a few days in early May, killing 200 people in the aircraft and at least 70 on the ground.
An EAS Airlines BAC One-Eleven 500 crashed just after take-off from Kano, Nigeria, on 4 May on a domestic flight to Lagos, killing seven crew and 66 passengers out of 79 people on board, then colliding with buildings causing the deaths of more than 50 people on the ground. Airline sources say the pilot did not report technical problems. The aircraft, 5N-ESF, was built in 1980 and powered by two Rolls-Royce Spey 512 engines.
On 7 May an EgyptAir Boeing 737-500 en route from Cairo, Egypt to Tunis, Tunisia, crashed just below a hill-top around 3.2nm (6km) to the west of Tunis Carthage airport on a non-precision final approach. The weather was stormy with heavy rain. Windshear was a possible contributory factor.
EgyptAir reports 14 people killed and four critically injured out of 63 on board. The aircraft (SU-GBI) was built in 1991.
The pilot of a China Northern Boeing MD-82 (B-2138) in-bound to Dalian's Zhoushuizi airport from Beijing on 7 May reported a cabin fire, shortly after which the aircraft crashed into Dalian Bay around 10km offshore killing all 103 passengers and nine crew on board. Bodies and a catering trolley recovered from the sea were badly burned, indicating the cabin fire had been intense, say Chinese state media. The aircraft, which entered service in 1990, was one of a batch of MD-80s built by the Shanghai Aviation Industrial Corp.
Neither the cockpit voice recorder nor flight data recorder had been recovered as Flight International closed for press.
Source: Flight International
