Board faults repairs, FAA in 2005 Bahamas-bound plane crash
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| Published on Thursday, May 31, 2007 |
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By John Hughes
WASHINGTON, USA (Bloomberg): A seaplane crash near Miami in December 2005 that killed all 20 people on board when the right wing fell off resulted from poor maintenance and faulty oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, a US safety board said.
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| An undated file photo shows a Grumman G-73T Turbine Mallard, operated by Chalk's Ocean Airways, landing on the water near Nassau in the Bahamas. AFP PHOTO |
The 58-year-old Grumman Turbo Mallard plane crashed off the Florida coast on December 19, 2005, shortly after takeoff for the Bahamas. It was operated by Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Chalk's International Airlines, which was founded in 1919 and calls itself the oldest operating airline in the US.
"The Chalk's operation had many problems," Joe Osterman, managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a meeting today in Washington. "The specific problem in this accident was their faulty repairs and the FAA's failure to do anything about it."
The wing developed cracks because of fatigue over several years, and one crack had been subject to a poor repair attempt, the board found. The FAA inspector overseeing the airline failed to detect the wing flaws, didn't ensure that Chalk's documented its repairs and said he was "comfortable" with the carrier's maintenance program, the NTSB said at the hearing.
"The system failed," board member Kathryn O'Leary Higgins said. "We lost this aircraft, and we lost these passengers, and I'm very troubled by it." FAA, Airline Responses The FAA and the airline both said they did what they were supposed to do.
Chalk's didn't detect the cracks even though it did all required maintenance, which the FAA approved, said Dennis O'Hara, a Fort Lauderdale attorney representing the airline.
"You're doing what you're supposed to be doing at the time," O'Hara told reporters. "It's kind of tough to blame the carrier for doing a faulty inspection."
A 16-inch crack in the wing had been patched, though a more significant flaw in a nearby support beam hadn't been fixed, the NTSB found. The carrier had no record of patching the crack.
O'Hara said the plane probably came to Chalk's in the late 1990s with the repair already having been done and no record of it given to the airline.
The FAA inspector, who retired three months after the crash, executed his work program for overseeing Chalk's, agency spokesman Les Dorr said.
"It appears that the board is making a judgment that the work program was inadequate," Dorr said. "He did exactly what he was supposed to. It's difficult to understand how they connect the dots to say the FAA contributed to the accident." | | | | Reads : 31 |
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