A faulty altimeter contributed to the fatal crash last week of a Turkish Airlines jet, sending a signal that caused it to slow down too abruptly, Dutch investigators said on Wednesday.
The plane crashed about 1km short of the runway, just outside Amsterdam’s international airport, killing nine of the more than 130 people aboard.
The Dutch Safety Board, which is investigating the Feb. 25 accident at Schiphol Airport, told reporters that one of the jetliner’s two radio altimeters, instruments that gauge an aircraft’s altitude, had incorrectly indicated that the plane, a Boeing 737-800, was approximately at ground level, prompting the automatic pilot to throttle back the engines in preparation for touchdown. The plane was actually at almost 600m.
The Dutch investigators’ preliminary report said that flight recordings indicated that the pilots had been notified that the left altimeter was not working correctly, but that “provisional data indicates that this signal was not regarded to be a problem.”
It also said that “initially the crew did not react to the issues at hand.”
Later, when an alarm indicated that the plane’s speed was too slow, it appears that the pilots gave the plane more fuel, but by then it was too late, said Pieter van Vollenhoven, an investigator who spoke at a news conference in Amsterdam.
Fred Sanders, a spokesman for the Dutch Safety Board, said previous flight recordings indicated that the plane had twice before had problems with its left radio altimeter during landings.
The report said: “The board is of the opinion that extra attention is needed for the role of the radio altimeter when using the automatic pilot and the automatic throttle system.”
“The board has issued a warning for Boeing today requesting extra attention to a part of a manual for the Boeing 737, in which is stated that in case of malfunction of the radio altimeter[s], the automatic pilot and throttle system that are connected to this may not be used for approach and landing,” it said.
Boeing, which has sent a team to assist the investigation, issued a statement on Wednesday reminding its Boeing 737 operators to “carefully monitor primary flight instruments during critical phases of flight.”
Jim Proulx, a spokesman for Boeing in Seattle, declined to provide any further information about the accident.
A Boeing spokeswoman, Sandy Angers, said that when one of the two radio altimeters fails, a message is supposed to appear on the captain’s flight display.
The plane that crashed hit the ground traveling about 175kph, landing on its tail, then skidded on its belly and broke into three parts. The jet was at about 600m when the altimeter malfunctioned, indicating the plane was at minus 2.4m, the Dutch report said. It said that there was mist and that the runway would not yet have been visible.
Gideon Ewers, a spokesman for the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations in London, said there was nothing unusual in the fact that the pilots of the flight, en route from Istanbul, were landing by autopilot.
More than 1,500 Boeing 737-800s have been delivered to 89 customers, and 1,490 more are on order by airlines around the world.
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