An attorney and air safety expert – with experience in vintage aircraft, which have crashed due to wing failure – yesterday disclosed that three, significant factors likely precipitated the crash of Chalks Ocean Airways Flight 101.
On Wednesday, U.S. investigators said the 58-year-old Grumman G-73T Mallard craft that lost its wing and crashed in waters off Miami shortly after takeoff had undetected cracks in its airframe, which may have caused the aircraft to break up.
The cracks were found in the main support beam of the wing.
According to aviation lawyer Jack London, the aircraft’s age, the addition of a new engine on an old plane and the frequent transportation of passengers made the Grumman’s crash virtually inevitable.
“These three bad things all came together at once,” he said.
“The plane was designed in World War II, while it was a very nice design at the time, it was not made of composite materials like crafts are being made now and it would be very difficult to expect an airplane like that to fly in peak conditions for much more than 25,000 to 30,000 hours no matter how well maintained,” said the attorney based in Austin, Texas.
He noted that the turboprops – which replaced the Grumman’s original piston engine – are new, more powerful engines created for a faster, sharper rate of climb. He said this placed new stress on what was already an old airframe by changing the direction of load on the wings and all its attachments.
“You change the direction of force and the amount of force on the loading and you are going to cause either bending or fractures on the loads and you can see those with the naked eye. You can’t see them on an inspection,” Mr. London explained.
He said while retrofits are common, thousands of hours of take-offs and landings cause the kind of stress fractures that can only be detected with microscopic procedures such as dye penetrations and x-rays.
“When you do that it is going to take so much money to maintain their airplane that you can’t fly it at a profit,” Mr. London said.
“When you use airplanes that are in those conditions for passengers you are taking a risk. For someone who may be a private enthusiast and build a sport plane or old antique plane for fun and show it in air shows – okay, but when you put passengers in them for profit, you are going to lose some of those airplanes.”
Chalks Flight 101 was on its way to Bimini when it went down off Miami Beach shortly after take off, killing all 20 aboard, including three infants. Eleven of the passengers were Biminites.
Officials at the U.S. National Transportation and Safety Board have stressed that determining the exact cause of the crash could take anywhere from nine to twelve months.
By: Tosheena Robinson-Blair, The Bahama Journal
