Swissair investigation team proud of sleuthing
effort that found crash cause
HALIFAX (CP) - It must have seemed like an impossible task: a plane
sitting in two million pieces on the ocean floor and, somewhere in the
splintered remains, a reason why it hurtled from the sky.
But within hours of Swissair Flight 111 plowing into waters off Nova
Scotia, Larry Vance and Vic Gerden began an obsessive search for answers.
Vance, an aviation investigator with the Transportation Safety Board, was
watching the news on Sept. 2, 1998, when he heard a jetliner had gone down
and that there were likely no survivors.
For most of the night, he was on the phone to colleagues like Gerden,
making plans to get to Halifax and begin what would become one of the
country's most complex and difficult aviation investigations.
"When we started off we knew it was going to be a huge project, but I
don't think we knew until we were into it by a number of weeks or maybe
even two or three months just how huge it was going to be," Vance said
Friday in Halifax, a day after the board released its final report into
the disaster.
Those efforts spanned 4? years, in which a small team of specialists
from various agencies spent seven days a week sifting through mangled
debris in the hunt for an elusive cause.
For Gerden, it meant a prolonged separation from his family that will
only end in the coming days when he returns home after being based first
in Halifax and then Ottawa.
"I'm looking forward to a shorter work week and more time with my
family," Gerden, the lead investigator in the case, said from one of many
hotel rooms that have been his home in recent years.
On Sept. 3, he packed his bags and headed east from his Winnipeg home.
He then hunkered down in a hotel and the sprawling hangars in Shearwater
where pieces of the MD-11 were being stored.
Gerden spent his days shuttling between sites, examining different
pieces of wreckage for clues as to what caused the jetliner to suffer a
catastrophic power failure just over an hour after it left New York for
Geneva.
The answers didn't come immediately, but there were indications in the
first couple of months that the plane's wiring played a crucial role in a
fire that seemed to have been concentrated above the pilots' in the
cockpit ceiling.
"That was a major task to go through the couple hundred kilometres of
wire that was in small pieces, and try to identify those pieces of wire
that belonged to the front part of the airplane," Gerden said in an
interview.
From shattered bits, some the size of a quarter, they managed to
retrieve wires that showed damage caused by arcing, a phenomenon in which
the wire's outer lining becomes chafed or corroded and sparks can ignite.
Initially they had seven pieces, then 14 and ultimately 20 strands of
charred wire suctioned off the ocean floor that would prove critical to
determining the plane's fate.
Piece by piece, the team worked to craft a sequence of events that
could explain why the pilots began smelling a strange odour 53 minutes
into the flight, and then minutes later lost communications and control.
Months later they moved from the hangars to labs in Ottawa, where they
had to develop new computer-modelling programs to understand what
happened. They subjected various materials to ignition sources to see how
they performed. And they did a descent profile to discover that the plane
got locked into a right-banked turn with a 20-degree list at a speed of
560 kilometres per hour before hitting the water.
Their focus turned to a flammable insulation material that lined the
cockpit cabin, which they concluded allowed the fire to spread rapidly
from the pilot's overhead area to outside their cabin.
Eventually they linked it together, showing that arcs on at least two
pieces of wire were fanned by the highly flammable blanket insulation - a
conclusion they're extremely proud of reaching given the complexity of the
case.
"That's a tremendous success," says Vance. "When you look at starting
with a couple million pieces of airplane on the bottom of the ocean and
you end up finding an arc that was almost too small to see with the naked
eye . . . our satisfaction is very, very high."
Many will now return to their previous assignments as aviation
investigators. Vance, who will resume his regular investigative
activities, said releasing the report capped off one of the most demanding
periods in his career and life.
"I was in Halifax for 19 months and that was working seven days a week
with very few trips home," Vance said.
"It's been a long road."
Perhaps the most rewarding aspect was the appreciation many of the
family members expressed to the duo when they met again Thursday.
Emotional relatives praised the men and thanked them for their years of
work.
"That was gratifying, for sure," said Vance.