Air India Probe May Take Two Weeks to Unlock Fatal Crash Data

Investigators may spend as long as two weeks analyzing data before they can say what caused India’s deadliest air disaster in 14 years.
The fire-damaged cockpit voice recorder recovered from the hillside crash site yesterday should yield the necessary clues, the government said in a statement. The aviation regulator will seek to determine how a 2-1/2 year old Air India Express Boeing Co. 737-800 flown by experienced pilots overshot the runway and burst into flames, killing 158 passengers and crew.
Air travel has doubled in the past six years as rising disposable incomes in the world’s second-fastest growing major economy encourage people to shun trains and take a plane for long-distance journeys. The government plans to spend as much as $2.6 billion on modernizing the nation’s airports and aviation infrastructure, including 35 facilities in smaller cities.
“Before clearing aircraft orders, we need to think whether we have the infrastructure,” said A. Ranganathan, a Chennai, south India-based aviation consultant and a former commercial pilot. “Proper planning is required for infrastructure development.”
India’s airports reported as many as 70 “near misses” in the last three years, according to minister Patel. The reasons include “co-ordination failures” and stress and fatigue due to heavy traffic, he told Parliament in March.
Flight IX-812 from Dubai to Mangalore crashed at about 6:05 a.m. on May 22. All the bodies of the dead have been removed from the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800, Harpreet Singh, Air India’s emergency response coordinator, said yesterday in Mumbai. Of those, 87 have been identified. There were eight survivors.
23/05/10 Vipin Nair and Rakteem Katakey/Bloomberg/Business Week

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Categories: Air India Budget May 2010, Airports May 2010, NACIL May 2010, Safety May 2010