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Cameroon: Families of Crash Victims Uncomfortable With Delayed Results
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The Post (Buea)
9 May 2008
Posted to the web 9 May 2008
Leocadia Bongben
Families of Mbanga Pongo victims have expressed their discomfort with the delay in the release of results of the inquiry into the cause of the crash and the payment of compensation to those involved.
Searching for the victims
The wife of a victim, Fru Yvette, whose husband died in the cash, maintained that the delay would make a leeway for avoidance of compensation payment. "There was either a mechanical or electrical fault which the manufacturing companies are not ready to accept", she supposed.
Mrs. Fru said negotiations with Kenyan Airways are on, stating that the evaluation of compensation depends on who the victim was. For business persons, the amount of money the victim would have invested is estimated for payment.
According to Yvette, as a civil servant, capable of taking care of herself, Kenya Airways after viewing her pay slip should pay the compensation to her children.To her, the money is not the problem but the information; which she believes is vital for families of the deceased.
Results Not Immediate
Meanwhile, during a press briefing on the evolution of the inquiry so far, the General Manager of the Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority, Ignatius Sama Juma, said the results would not be released immediately. He maintained that it is a technical job that has to be done meticulously and not rushed.
According to him, there is no time limit to the publication of the results. He warned against speculations, stating that it took France eight years to publish the results of the Concord crash. He equally debunked allegations that the Kenyan Airways started burning while on air attributing the explosion to the high speed with which the flight crashed down.
The CCAA DG maintained that the problem of the Douala Airport is not the absence of a Radar Control as journalist attempted to suggest. However, he said the site could have been located faster if there was one.
He explained that studies were carried out on the necessity of radar in Douala in 2003 and the results communicated to government. According to him, there were proposals for radar to cover the totality of Cameroon's airspace but the problem is the control of traffic. He said weather performant radar has been installed in the Douala Airport.
In answer to what the conversation of the pilot was all about from the information on the cockpit voice recorder, Sama held that the pilot said they were encountering some problems, which would be made known later.
Tracing the activities after the crash, he said the flight data recorder was recovered on May 7, 2007, read out carried on may 24, 2007; the cockpit voice recorder equally recovered on June 15, 2007 and downloading was carried out in Canada on June 20 2007. He said after the formation of the commission of inquiry on May 7, 2007, it has been meeting in Cameroon, Kenya and the US.
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Sama told The Post that interviews have been carried out with the staff of the Douala Airport, witnesses interviewed, preliminary recordings done, meteorological services reviewed, including search and rescue evaluation. He said the meeting in the US was convened to look at aircraft performance concerning the Flight Data Recorder, and the cockpit voice recorder and the human performance evaluation.
The CCAA Boss said in Kenya the airline safety programmes were reviewed, including the standard operating procedures, flight crew and training programmes, crew resource management, training and policies and the aircraft technical records, the crew records, flight certification as well as qualification and experience of air navigation regulations.
The last 72 hours of the flight were equally reviewed between Benin and Cotonou. In April 2008, a second meeting in the Pensacola, US, the Commission studied the spatial disorientation, the engineering simulation of Boeing and analysis of the data collected and compilation of the final report at the end of the year.
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