Crash sparks fear,        search for safer flight

CHRIS MORRIS

PEGGY’S COVE, N.S. (CP) - The worst part of flying for Miles Gerety is the emergency procedures demonstration. The point at which the flight attendant shows passengers how to use life preservers acts as a trigger for Gerety’s emotions and the 48-year-old Connecticut lawyer begins to cry quietly.

Gerety lost his older brother, Pierce, on Sept. 2 when Swissair Flight 111 plunged into St. Margaret’s Bay off this scenic Nova Scotia cove, killing all 229 people on board.

He has since organized a support group to help families and friends of the victims cope with their loss.

Gerety says fear of flying is one of the most common, lingering effects of the crash, especially for children who lost relatives.

"I think for many people, fear of flying will be something they face the rest of their lives," he says.

"But for me, and I know for other family members I’ve since flown with, it’s the emotional pain of wondering, ‘What did they go through?’ That’s indescribably tough."

The final moments of Flight 111 are the subject of intense investigation by Canada’s Transportation Safety Board, which is
trying to find out what went wrong on board the three-engine, wide-bodied MD-11 during a regularly scheduled flight from New York to Geneva.

What is known is that over a period of time lasting roughly 20 minutes there was an escalating emergency in the jetliner,
beginning when pilots detected smoke in the cockpit and ending when the plane plummeted into the ocean off Peggy’s Cove.

Investigators know there was heat and smoke in the forward section of the plane. Some experts speculate it was so hot, the pilot and co-pilot would have been forced out of the cockpit.

Evidence of electrical arcing was found in damaged wiring recovered from the wreckage, a phenomenon in which electricity flashes like lightning, vaporizing everything in its blazing hot path.

It’s also known that one of the three engines wasn’t operating before the crash - the one in the tail - and that the flight data
recorder and the cockpit voice recorder stopped working six minutes before the end, pointing to massive electrical failure.

It could be as much as two years, maybe more, before the safety board has any hard answers.

That’s fine with Gerety.

"I think I speak for the majority of family members when I say we would much rather have a slow, thorough, scientific process than a quick answer we could never trust," he says.

"It’s important to get it right."

It’s important for more than the grieving families.

International air travel is speeding into an era of phenomenal growth and change, spurred by technological improvements and an increasingly mobile population.

But devastating crashes like Swissair off Nova Scotia, the TWA explosion off Long Island, N.Y., and the Valujet disaster in the Florida Everglades - all within the last three years - have raised disturbing questions about the safety of air travel.

Jim Burin of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., a non-profit international group dedicated to improving air safety, says the accident rate has been holding steady over the last five to eight years.

He doesn’t think flying is becoming more dangerous, or less dangerous, and that’s the difficulty.

"The problem is that in the next 10 to 15 years, we’re looking at probably a 50 to 80 per cent increase in aviation traffic," Burin says.

"So the problem is if we keep the same rate but we increase the volume that much, we’re going to have more accidents . . . In fact 50 years from now, if the projections for traffic increases hold true, we could be seeing an accident a week."

Burin says the airline industry and its regulators are keenly aware that the spectacle of so many crashes would deeply concern the traveling public.

"Everyone is working really hard at getting the rate down," he says.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has launched a safer skies program that includes close examination of older airplanes and of aging airplane components, such as electrical and hydraulic systems.

"The new emphasis of a lot of the current safety initiatives, safer skies and some others, is not necessarily reacting to the last accident, which we tend to do very well," Burin says.

"But rather look at past accidents and incidents, look at overall trends and base our focus on the actual data."

Investigators have recovered over 85 per cent of the Swissair jet from the the bottom of St. Margaret’s Bay. They hope to reconstruct the cockpit.

Scorched wires from the wreckage included some that powered the plane’s in-flight entertainment system. The system has
since been disconnected by Swissair.

Around the world, pilots appear to have become more alert to smoke-related problems and are quick to land when smoke is detected.

Meanwhile, Gerety says mid-January will be a critical time for families of the victims.

Around Jan. 15, the RCMP will shut down its Family Contact Office at Canadian Forces Base Shearwater, near Halifax,
where officers helped the coroner identify the shattered remains of victims.

The recovery and identification process is complete and families that have not already done so now can make preparations to bring home remains of their relatives.

Gerety said some people will travel to Halifax because they don’t want their loved ones to come home alone.

"Jan. 15 seems to be kind of an end point for us, at least in terms of identification," says Gerety, whose brother has been
identified but whose remains have yet to be returned.

"Those are the kinds of things we’re focusing on now."

© The Canadian Press, 1998