David Learmount/LONDON
The crew of Swissair's Boeing MD-11 flight SR111 made a "Pan" emergency call to Canada's Moncton air traffic control centre (ATCC), reporting smoke in the cockpit. Sixteen minutes later the aircraft crashed into the sea, killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew on board, according to a succinct summary of the tragedy released by the Canadian Transportation Safety Board 18h after the acciden at night on 2 September off the coast of Nova Scotia.
At the time of the "Pan" call ("Pan, Pan, Pan" is the spoken code indicating an emergency one grade below "Mayday"), the aircraft was cruising at 33,000ft (10,000m) and had just been handed over by the New York ATCC to Moncton.
As well as reporting smoke, the captain requested a diversion to Boston, but was immediately advised to go to Halifax because it was closer - respective ranges were 305km (190nm) and 78km. The captain accepted Halifax, was given radar vectors for the 2,682m-long main runway, 06/24, and began to descend and dump fuel in preparation for landing.
The seven-year-old aircraft (HB-IWF) had left New York Kennedy Airport at 20:18 local time, almost exactly 1h before the emergency was declared, bound for Geneva, Switzerland.
According to the Canadian search and rescue authorities, some bodies recovered from the sea were clad in lifejackets, so it appears that the cabin crew had been instructed to carry out preparations for an emergency landing. When approaching 8,000ft, the captain is reported to have upgraded the emergency to "Mayday" and, almost immediately after that, the aircraft disappeared from radar.
Impact with the sea appears to have been severe because the debris sections are small and widely spread, but one large hull section has been located in water some 50m deep about 15km off Nova Scotia.
The flight data recorder had been located as Flight International went to press. From the information available so far, the location of any possible fire in the aircraft is not clear. The other important unknown is whether the aircraft was controllable at impact, or whether the possibility of a controlled descent was limited by the pilots' ability to see instruments and the surface because of smoke and external darkness.
This is the first fatal Swissair accident since 1979, when a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 overran the runway at Athens, Greece, killing 14 passengers.
Source: Flight International
