Swissair Flight 111

thumb|Approximate location of the crash

Swissair Flight 111 was a scheduled international passenger flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, United States, to Cointrin Airport in Geneva, Switzerland. The flight was also a codeshare flight with Delta Air Lines. On 2 September 1998, the McDonnell Douglas MD-11 operating this flight crashed into the Atlantic Ocean southwest of Halifax Stanfield International Airport at the entrance to St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada, killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew members on board. The crash site was from shore, roughly equidistant from the small fishing and tourist communities of Peggys Cove and Bayswater. It is the deadliest accident in Swissair history, the deadliest involving the MD-11, and the second-deadliest aviation accident in Canada, behind Arrow Air Flight 1285R.

The search and rescue response, crash recovery operation, and investigation by the Government of Canada took more than four years and cost CA$57 million. The investigation carried out by the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) concluded that flammable material used in the aircraft's structure allowed a fire to spread beyond the control of the flight crew, resulting in the crash of the aircraft. Several wide-ranging recommendations were made, which were incorporated into newer US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) standards.

Background

Aircraft

The aircraft involved was a seven-year-old McDonnell Douglas MD-11 and registered as HB-IWF. The cabin was configured with 241 passenger seats. First- and business-class seats were equipped with in-seat in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems from Interactive Flight Technologies. It allowed the first- and business-class passengers to select their own movies and games and to gamble. The system was installed in business class one year before the incident, between 21 August and 9 September 1997. It was installed in first class five months later, in February 1998, due to delivery delays.

The first officer, 36-year-old Stefan Löw, had logged approximately 4,800 hours of total flying time, including 230 hours on the MD-11. Four minutes later, the odour returned and smoke became visible, prompting the pilots to make a "pan-pan" radio call to Moncton air traffic control (ATC), the area control center (ACC) station in charge of air traffic over Nova Scotia. The pan-pan call indicated that there was an urgency due to smoke in the cockpit but did not declare an emergency as denoted by a "mayday" call. The crew requested a diversion to Boston ( away) before accepting Moncton ATC's offer of radar vectors to the closer Halifax International Airport in Enfield, Nova Scotia, away.

The aircraft flight data recorder stopped operating at 22:25:40 ADT (01:25:40 UTC), followed one second later by the cockpit voice recorder. The aircraft's transponder briefly resumed transmission of secondary radar returns from 22:25:50 to 22:26:04 ADT (01:25:50 to 01:26:04 UTC), at which time the aircraft's altitude was . After this, the aircraft could be tracked only through primary radar, which does not provide altitude information.

Victims

{| class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed sortable" style="margin:0 0 0.5em 1em; float:right;"

!colspan=4|Final tally of passenger nationalities

!Nationality||Passengers||Crew||Total

|Afghanistan||1||0||1

|Canada||3||0||3

|Canada and Morocco||1||0||1

|China||1||0||1

|Egypt||1||0||1

|France||41||0||41

|France and United Kingdom||1||0||1

|France and United States||2||0||2

|Germany||1||0||1

|India||1||0||1

|Iran||1||0||1

|Iran and United States||1||0||1

|Israel and Switzerland||1||0||1

|Italy||3||0||3

|Mexico||1||0||1

|Russia||1||0||1

|Saudi Arabia||1||0||1

|Switzerland||31||13||44

|Switzerland and Greece||1||0||1

|Switzerland and Netherlands||1||0||1

|Switzerland and United Kingdom||2||0||2

|Switzerland and United States||1||0||1

|Spain||1||0||1

|United Kingdom||3||0||3

|United Kingdom and United States||2||0||2

|United States||110||1||111

|Serbia and Montenegro|Yugoslavia||1||0||1

!Total||215||14||229

|}

There were 132 Americans (including one employee each from Delta Air Lines and United Airlines), 41 Swiss (including the 13 crew members), 30 French, 4 Canadians, 3 Britons, 3 Italians, 2 Greeks, 2 Lebanese, and 1 each from Afghanistan, China, Germany, India, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, St. Kitts and Nevis, Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia, and 4 other passengers on board. Epidemiologists Jonathan Mann and Mary Lou Clements-Mann, a married couple who were both prominent researchers of HIV/AIDS, died in the crash.

Post-crash response

Search and rescue operation

The search and rescue (SAR) operation was code-named Operation Persistence and was launched immediately by Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Halifax (JRCC Halifax). The search and rescue operation consisted of 400 Royal Canadian Air Force personnel, 700 Canadian Army personnel; the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG); Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary (CCGA) resources; and 450 Royal Canadian Mounted Police and more than 2400 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel who were participating as part of Operation Homage.

The crash site's proximity to Halifax placed it within one hour's sailing time of ships docked at Canada's largest naval base, CFB Halifax, and one of the largest CCG bases in Canada, the CCG Regional Headquarters in Dartmouth. Calls went out immediately, and ships sailed directly to St. Margaret's Bay.

The provincial ambulance service, Emergency Health Services (EHS), received word of the crash at 22:39 AT and ordered 21 emergency units from Halifax, the South Shore, and the Annapolis Valley to respond. An EHS helicopter was also sent to the crash site, and the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax was put on emergency alert. The emergency health services were stood down around 3:30 the next morning, as expectations of finding survivors diminished.

The land search, including shoreline searching, was the responsibility of Halifax Regional Search and Rescue. The organization was responsible for all ground operations, including military operations and other ground search and rescue teams.

Search and recovery operation

By the afternoon of 3 September, it was apparent that there were no survivors from the crash. On the morning of 4 September, JRCC Halifax de-tasked dedicated SAR assets and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) were given control of the scene.

The aircraft broke up on impact with the water, and most of the debris sank to the ocean floor at a depth of . Some debris was found floating in the crash area, and over the following weeks, debris washed up on nearby shorelines.

thumb|right|[[CCGS Hudson|CCGS Hudson searches for Swissair Flight 111 debris on 14 September, with (centre), (right), and a (rear).]]

With CAF divers (navy clearance divers, port inspection divers, ship's team divers, and Army combat divers) working on the recovery, the Government of Canada requested a larger dedicated salvage recovery vessel from the Government of the United States. was tasked to the recovery effort, arriving from Philadelphia on 9 September. Among her crew were 32 salvage divers, and she welcomed two teams of Canadian Navy clearance divers that flew across Canada from Fleet Diving Unit (FDU) Pacific.

thumb|[[USS Grapple (ARS-53)|USS Grapple assisted in the underwater search phase of the Swissair Flight 111 crash near Halifax, Nova Scotia. ]]

The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) were found by the Canadian submarine Okanagan using sonar to detect the underwater locator beacon signals and were quickly retrieved by Canadian Navy divers (the FDR on 6 September and the CVR on 11 September 1998). Both had stopped recording when the aircraft lost electrical power at approximately , 5 minutes and 37 seconds before impact.

thumb|left|After completing 40 minutes of recovery work on the ocean floor, U.S. Navy divers from Mobile Diving Salvage Unit Two are raised to the deck of [[USS Grapple (ARS-53)|USS Grapple.]]

On 2 October 1998, the TSB initiated a heavy lift operation to retrieve major portions of the wreckage from deep water before expected winter storms began. By 21 October, an estimated 27% of the wreckage was recovered. At that point in the investigation, the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the IFE system started to overheat. The TSB released its preliminary report on 30 August 2000 and the final report in 2003. Jerome Hauer, the head of the emergency management task force of New York City, praised the swift actions of Swissair and codeshare partner Delta Air Lines in responding to the accident; he had criticized Trans World Airlines in its response to the TWA Flight 800 crash in 1996.

Investigation

Identification of victims

The RCMP medical examiners positively identified most of the bodies within ten weeks of the accident. Due to extreme impact forces, only one body was identifiable by sight. DNA profiling was used to identify approximately one hundred bodies. At the time, it was "the largest DNA identification project ever undertaken in Canada". The RCMP contacted relatives of victims to request medical histories and dental records. They were also asked to provide blood samples for genetic matching in the DNA identification of the victims. About 90 bodies were identified by the medical examiners using dental records; owing to the large number of ante-mortem (before death) dental X-rays available to the examiners, these bodies were identified by late October 1998. Fingerprints and ante-mortem X-rays were used to identify around 30 bodies.

As each piece of wreckage was brought in, it was carefully cleaned with fresh water, sorted, and weighed. The item was then placed in a specific area of a hangar at CFB Shearwater, based on a grid system representing the various sections of the plane. All items deemed insignificant to the crash were stored with similar items in large boxes. When a box was full, it was weighed and moved to a custom-built temporary structure (J-Hangar) on a discontinued runway for long-term storage. If deemed significant to the investigation, the item was documented, photographed, and kept in the active examination hangar.

Cockpit recordings

The cockpit voice recorder used a recording tape that operated on a 30-minute loop. It therefore retained only that half-hour of the flight before the recorders failed, six minutes before the crash. and thus were not publicly disclosed, although the air traffic control recordings are less strictly privileged: section 29 of the same act provides only that they may not be used in certain legal proceedings. The air traffic control transcripts were released within days of the crash in 1998 and the air traffic control audio was released in May 2007, following a ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal. Several key minutes of the air traffic control audio can be found on the Toronto Star web site.

In 1999, an article in The Wall Street Journal alleged that the pilots disagreed about whether to dump fuel or descend straight to Halifax. Based on internal TSB summaries of the CVR recording, the Journal claimed that co-pilot Löw suggested steps aimed at a quick landing, which were ignored or rejected by Captain Zimmermann. Swissair and Canadian investigators would not comment on the accuracy of the reporting, with a TSB spokesman deeming it "a reporter's interpretation of a summary document of what might have been" on the CVR.

Probable cause

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigation identified eleven causes and contributing factors of the crash in its final report. The first and most prominent was the following: