PHILADELPHIA — The cockpit voice recorder was not working on a medical transport plane that killed seven people when it plummeted into a Philadelphia neighbourhood in January and likely had not been functioning for several years, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report Thursday. The NTSB also confirmed Thursday that the crew made no distress calls to air traffic control. A ground warning system that may contain flight data memory is still being evaluated by the manufacturer, the agency said.
The medical transportation plane plummeted into a residential and commercial area within a minute of taking off from Northeast Philadelphia Airport and erupted into a fireball on the evening of Jan. 31. Officials said the crash killed all six people aboard the Learjet 55 and a seventh person who was inside a vehicle on the ground. At least two dozen others on the ground were injured, including a 10-year-old boy in a vehicle who was hit by debris while trying to protect his sister.
Former NTSB chairman Jim Hall called the finding about the cockpit recording “disturbing” because “that and the whole flight data recorder are important to find out what went wrong so it can be prevented in the future.”
“It’s a significant loss of important information that should have been there,” Hall said. He noted that the lack of any distress call shows that the emergency occurred too quickly for the crew to communicate with the tower.
Those on the plane included an 11-year-old girl who had been receiving medical treatment at Shriners Children’s Philadelphia hospital. Jet Rescue Air Ambulance said the plane had been taking Valentina Guzmán Murillo and her 31-year-old mother, Lizeth Murillo Osuna, home to Mexico.
Messages seeking comment were left with Jet Rescue on Thursday. The company had previously identified its team members aboard as Dr. Raul Meza Arredondo, 41; the captain, Alan Montoya Perales, 46; the copilot, Josue de Jesus Juarez Juarez, 43; and paramedic Rodrigo Lopez Padilla, 41. All four were from Mexico.
According to the report, the recorder was recovered eight feet (2.4 metres) underground after the plane crashed and had significant damage, including exposure to liquids. After extensive cleaning and repairs, the agency discovered the 30-minute tape did not have any audio of the flight.
The high-impact crash destroyed or badly damaged more than a dozen homes and business, and left debris from the plane scattered across a wide area nearly 500 yards (457.20 metres) long and 300 yards (274 metres) wide.
Former NTSB investigator Jeff Guzzetti said the loss of any cockpit recordings would make the agency’s work more difficult, but not impossible. He hoped the ground warning system will be able to provide some data, while wondering why the cockpit voice recorder had not been inspected regularly.
“I really think that puts a black mark on this Mexican operator, for not ensuring that their cockpit voice recorder was operating,” Guzzetti said. “The NTSB, I think, will still be able to come to a probable cause, just because they’re really good at extracting circumstantial evidence.”
Several victims on the ground have retained law firms to represent them in potential lawsuits, including a man who spent 11 days in an intensive care burn unit after his SUV became engulfed in jet fuel as he drove home from work.
“This is going to be a long road of recovery in front of him,” lawyer Andrew Parker Felix of Orlando, Florida, has said of his client.
The crash was among a series of recent aviation disasters and close calls that left some people worried about the safety of flying. It came just two days after an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter collided in midair in Washington, D.C. — the deadliest U.S. air disaster in a generation.
Article written by Maryclaire Dale, The Associated Press
