Episode 41 - Dangerous Dalliances: EgyptAir 804 nicotine addiction & Aeroflot 821 intoxication

Episode 41 is about substance abuse, technocrats behaving badly, sub-standard crew training and fatal attractions to nicotine and C H 3 C H 2 OH — methylethyl alcohol, otherwise known as hootch, or in South Africa, dop. This is an episode that’s longer than usual, with quite a lot of ATC sound thrown in later. I hope you find it useful - remember this series is all about aviation safety which ironically is one of the positive results of a catastrophe. But only if we institute the improvements — and take note as aviators and administrators. Our first example of a legal drug causing a commercial airliner to crash is EgyptAir Flight 804 which took off from Paris’ De Gaulle Airport heading to Cairo International on 19th May 2016. As is the case in many of these accidents, cutting corners when it came to snag reporting caught up with everyone involved. And the geopolitical high jinks and obscurantism caught up with Bureaucrats too. This was no idle fiddle, an Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean north of Alexandria killing all 56 pax, 7 crew and 3 security staff aboard on that day. B In our second example, cutting the corners on training, more unresolved snags and alcohol caused the Aeroflot flight 821 disaster - a Boeing that crashed while the confused pilots were trying to land at Perm Airport in Russia, killing all 88 on board. Let’s kick off with the EgyptAir flight 804, an Airbus A320 registration SU-GCC serial number 2088 which had picked up mechanical snafus on four previous flights before the accident, according to automated messages analysed after the crash. EgyptAir pilots and the airline’s technical center in Cairo had ignored those errors. The Airbus was 13 years old, logging 48052 flight hours in 20773 flight cycles since its manufacture in 2003. This is one of the cases of a one error after another — and then one too many. The Airbus took off from de Gaule Airport at 23:09 local on the night of 19th May 2016 - bound for Cairo. It never made it. At 2h30 UTC the plane disappeared from radar while flying at 37,000 feet in clear weather 280 kilometers north of Alexandria. Finally, the world learned the Egyptian pilots had indeed been battling a fire in the cockpit. It was this that had caused the plane to spiral and break up, not a bomb, and the Egyptians knew it all along. The French BEA had been brazenly colluding with the Egyptians and hiding the truth.Now for our second example, and its a dangerous dalliance with alcohol that tipped the balance from incident to accident. Aeroflot 821 Boeing crashed on 14 September 2008, on approach to Perm International Airport in Russia, at 5:10 local time - it was dark and cloudy. All 82 passengers and six crew members were killed. Among the passengers was Russian Colonel General Gennady Troshev, Vladimir Putin’s advisor and commander of the North Caucasus Military District during the Second Chechen War. But for once, Putin was not fingered in the suspicious death of a comrade which comes as a surprise. The Air Crash investigation unveiled a litany of bad habits.