Swissair and McDonnell Douglas/Boeing have perpetrated the most cruel hoax possibly imaginable on the victims of Swissair 111

In open court before the Honorable James T. Giles, those defendants in some 170 lawsuits filed following the crash, told the court that they have agreed to share in the responsibility for the crash of Swissair 111 and not to contest liability for compensatory damages for the U.S. victims of the crash. There was, however, a proviso which was lost on most of the attendees, but not on the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee responsible to the victims of the crash to see to it that they are properly compensated. The lawyers for Swissair and Boeing conditioned their offer on the application of the Death on the High Seas Act that there be a forum non conveniens decision which would eliminate all foreign claimants against Boeing/McDonnell Douglas for product liability and a decision by the court to throw out the Article 28 cases (under the Warsaw Convention), in other words, all those foreign travelers who purchased their tickets abroad.

In short, this cruel hoax was an effort to grandstand before the public and the press in an attempt to appear that Swissair and Boeing were owning up to their unmistakable responsibility for this accident.

What is it that they really offered, however? First, the Death on the High Seas Act, which doesn’t even apply to this accident, may allow for recovery of economic damages only for those who are financially dependent upon the deceased. In short, the value of the cases for children on the aircraft would be virtually nothing. The value of the loss of society, companionship, loss of guidance and tutelage, fear of impending death, pain and suffering, and all of those intangible, non-economic items which are truly the measure of the loss of a person, might not be recoverable under the Death on the High Seas Act.

The Death on the High Seas Act, in fact, is so tenuous that both Houses of Congress have voted to either eliminate it retroactively to the crash of TWA 800, which preceded Swissair 111, or vastly limit its impact. Indeed, the crash of Swissair 111 didn’t happen on the High Seas, but in Canadian territorial waters.

Nonetheless, Boeing/McDonnell Douglas and Swissair would want to eliminate most of the damages recoverable by requiring as a condition of their payment the application of the hideous limitations that are imposed by a statute which most everyone agrees has long since outlived its usefulness.

In addition, in this world economy, the defendants would have the court throw out all claims for those on the aircraft who were not U.S. citizens, regardless of the basis of their claim.

The MD-11 was designed, certified and manufactured in California. It is supported both with respect to parts, service instructions, service bulletins and airworthiness directives from the United States. The pilot flight manuals were created in the United States, and supplements prepared, even to this day, in the United States. All the wiring, flammable insulation and virtually all of the installations that may be relevant to this accident and its cause occurred in the United States or by designers or manufacturers in the United States. Notwithstanding these facts, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing claim that it is not convenient for the litigation against them to take place in the United States. Where are the designers? Where are the certification people? Where are the people who built the aircraft? They are right here in the United States. Where are the people who designed and built the entertainment system? They are in the United States. The home office of McDonnell Douglas was in St. Louis, Missouri.

To have it the way the defendants want it, an American sitting in seat 4-A would have an entirely different recovery and different law applied to his recovery than a person sitting in seat 4-B. If the person sitting in 4-B happened to be a child even from the U.S., there would virtually no recovery. If the person in 4-A was a man who had no one dependent upon him, there would be virtually no recovery. If the person in 4-C was a Swiss citizen, there would be virtually no recovery except that provided under Swiss law.

Instead of resolving all of the cases in one single place before a Judge uniquely qualified to handle the case, in a court designed to handle such disasters, with procedures established to facilitate the administration of justice, the defendants would have two-thirds of the cases sent to twelve different countries, the application of twelve different sets of laws, with only God knows how much delay.

The only thing worse than the crash of Swissair 111 into Peggy’s Cove last September was the charade on the public, the world press and, worse, the court that Swissair, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing pulled on August 5, 1999.

– Arthur Alan Wolk

WHEN IT COMES TO AVIATION SAFETY, WHO IS REALLY TO BLAME?

The FAA … the agency that is supposed to protect us…

Why does it take an air crash to raise public concern about aviation safety? Even though air travel is still the safest means of transportation (based on the percentage of fatalities compared to the number of people who fly), there are hundreds of accidents just waiting to happen … and US Air 1016 was one of them. The FAA has known, for years, about the dangers of wind shear during hazardous weather conditions, and in fact, has been installing special Doppler radar systems at busier airports. However, the FAA never moves quickly enough. Charlotte-Douglas International Airport doesn’t have their Doppler radar yet. The scheduled delivery for 1995 wasn’t soon enough to have protected the 37 killed last week. While the FAA is bogged down in bureaucratic red-tape of its own making, pilots, who are the ultimately responsible for the safety of the flight, are denied timely information that can help prevent accidents like the one in Charlotte. Unfortunately, the FAA’s ineptitude doesn’t stop there. All too often, the FAA knows about manufacturing defects that will clearly affect the safety and/or crashworthiness of airplanes. The FAA doesn’t do anything about those either, or it acts too late.

Between December of 1992 and December of 1993, 13 people were killed in two airplane crashes caused by hurricane force turbulence in the wake of Boeing 757 jetliners. The FAA knew, as early as 1989, that the 757 would, sooner or later, cost lives. Again, the FAA did nothing.

Why didn’t the FAA react? By mandating safe distances between aircraft, the number of flights leaving from and arriving at airports would be cut down, which would cut into industry profits.

In the early ’70s, the FAA was aware that the DC-10 baggage door had a design flaw. It did not act, and 350 people were killed in a Turkish Airlines disaster.

The FAA knew if it allowed Boeing Company to glue certain airliner sections together, they would have to monitor the long term effects. They did not, and the roof blew from an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737, while the side blew out of a Boeing 747. More fatalities resulted in both cases.

The FAA knew there were service problems with the engine attachment bolts on the Boeing 747. It did not act, and two engines came off an El Al 747, killing 45 people in the Netherlands.

The FAA has known for years about flaws in various general aviation aircraft — everything from pilot seats that slide suddenly rearward, causing loss of aircraft control, to undrainable contamination in fuel tanks which result in engine stoppage, to tails that fluttered off hundreds of times, killing hundreds of people, to engines used in helicopters which are so unreliable that the Justice Department sued the manufacturer for fraud in regard to the engine’s unreliability, while the FAA continues to certify the engine safe for flight.

The list goes on and on, but the one thing is clear. It is time to overhaul the FAA from the top down, and bottom up.

The people within the FAA who want to do their jobs and are interested in safety cannot because they are overruled by managers. People with the agency who want to change things to make the FAA more safety conscious are overruled by political considerations imposed on the FAA by influence wielded by the aircraft manufacturers — the same manufacturers the FAA is supposed to regulate.

There is even a product liability bill that would not permit the imposition of punitive damages against an aircraft manufacturer, if the FAA certified the aircraft before it was marketed. Though everyone in government calls the FAA incompetent, Congress still wants to make the FAA’s approval the difference between people being compensated and manufacturers punished, and their not being held liable at all.

The FAA has the responsibility to ensure the safety of flight and to promote aviation. Aviation does not have to be promoted anymore, but safety of flight needs a lot of work. The new FAA needs to have as its sole job the enforcement of existing regulations, the streamlining of regulations to make them more effective, and the enforcement of those regulations (for a change) against those responsible to make flight safe: the aircraft manufacturers who can make the airplanes safe.

While the FAA may not put time and money into forestalling accidents until there is a tragedy, the FAA is itself a tragedy. Somebody needs to do something about its many faults before more lives are tragically and unnecessarily lost.

Arthur Alan Wolk

Portion of fee used to establish group to improve aircraft fire safety

PHILADELPHIA – (10/27/1999) Arthur Alan Wolk, internationally-known aviation attorney based in Philadelphia, on Friday, October 22, achieved a landmark first domestic settlement from Swissair flight 111. Today, Wolk announced that he is donating a portion of his fee to establish a panel of unbiased experts to study and recommend critical improvements in aircraft wiring and fire safety.

The settlement, reached on behalf of the family of 37-year-old Richard Coburn, a husband and father of three, formerly of East Brunswick, NJ, is hoped to be the first of many from the tragic plunge into the waters of Halifax, Nova Scotia of a Swissair MD-11. Wolk and Coburn’s widow both hope to achieve some lasting benefit from the tragedy by working to improve aviation safety.

The cause of this accident is still under investigation by Canadian and U.S. authorities. Privately, however, most agree that Wolk’s assessment, made within hours of the crash was correct – – that the disaster was preventable.

Wolk has been on the plaintiffs’ steering committees of most of the country’s major aircrash disasters and has correctly identified the causes of each disaster well in advance of the release of official findings. He is also credited with many times providing vital information to government investigators.

Wolk, who is a member of the Swissair 111 plaintiffs’ steering committee; the group that is guiding all of the victims’ cases through the courts, says that this early settlement will accelerate the process of closure for victims’ families whose agony has been prolonged due to the lack of settlements thus far.

“Now the Coburn family will be secure with Richard Coburn’s legacy and can begin the most important job of cherishing the memory of their wonderful husband and father. By working to improve aviation safety it is our hope that no other family will again suffer such unspeakable pain,” said Wolk.

Letter to U.S. Department of Transportation Dockets
By Arthur Alan Wolk
August 24, 1999

U.S. Dept. of Transportation Dockets
Docket No. FAA-1999-6001
400 Seventh Street, S.W.
Room Plaza 401
Washington, DC 20590

Re: Docket No. FAA-1999-6001; Notice No. 99-14

Gentlemen:

I oppose the introduction of a regulation that would allow the Federal Aviation Administration to afford protection of voluntary submitted information.

The predicate for this regulation is that those persons who might provide the FAA with useful safety or security information won’t do so if they are fearful that the information will be disclosed in response to a FOIA request. Historically, this has been demonstrated to be an entirely false assumption. The FAA has had in place a Service Difficulty Reporting System for at least forty years to my knowledge. Mechanics and others, without any compensation or hope for it, or any fear of the disclosure of this information, have provided the necessary safety information concerning the failure or near failure of aviation components that could affect flight safety for years. Unfortunately, they are frustrated because they recognize that year after year the information they have provided is not utilized by the FAA to improve aviation safety. Many mechanics I have spoken to have said that they stopped providing service difficulty reporting information because they see model after model of aircraft with no improvements and no changes and failing for the same reasons.

Thus, the paucity of information now provided to the FAA in connection with safety has nothing to do with fear of this information being disclosed under FOIA, it has to do with the disgust by the people who are responsible for providing such information with those who are responsible for using the information effectively to prevent accidents, i.e., the FAA. Thus, the basic predicate for the regulatory change is unfounded in fact.

Indeed, the FAA in response to pressure from manufacturers has refused to divulge information provided both by the manufacturers and those in the field on the basis that it is proprietary and confidential. Thus the FAA has effectively introduced, without regulatory authority for the same, the protection that it now hopes to introduce by way of a new regulatory scheme designed for one purpose and one purpose only preventing the public from knowing and obtaining access to safety information which has been previously withheld from them by both the Government and the private sector. That is the purpose of this rule, that is the thrust behind it, that is the reason it is introduced, and it is really so blatant that the FAA must really think the public are stupid by introducing a rule that is purportedly designed to enhance safety, but in reality is nothing more than an attempt to cover up the blunders of both the FAA and the industry with respect to aviation safety.

Indeed, even thought the FAA had no authority for it, even though the FAA kept from the public all the information concerning certification blunders (like the Boeing 737 rudder system), certification and safety blunders (like the lack of fire safety on all commercial aircraft wiring and insulation systems), and the list could go on and on, now the FAA wants to turn the Government into a secret repository of information that should be disclosed to the public anyway.

Why shouldn’t the public know that an aircraft is unsafe, and then make a choice not to fly it? Why shouldn’t the public know that there are failure rates of aircraft of such a magnitude they shouldn’t buy or fly in it? Why shouldn’t the public know that there are airlines not operating safely because they are conducting paper inspections and paper repairs? In short, what the aircraft manufacturers, the airlines and others want the FAA to do, and the FAA is falling all over itself to comply with, is to make everything a secret so nobody knows how bad it is out there and how badly the FAA is doing its job.

One example strikes me as being especially telling. I wrote a FOIA request, repeated FOIA requests as a matter of fact, arising out of the crashes of United 585 and USAir 427, two Boeing 737s that crashed because of the failure of the rudder servo valve, a probable cause found after nine years of investigation by the NTSB. Of course, the FAA in the State of Washington didn’t have any information that it found releasable, and when we took the deposition of Ken Frye, the FAA person in charge, FAA’s lawyers shut him down when we were asking sensitive certification questions. Of course, we didn’t get the information from the defendants because they cited all sorts of reasons why the information was either unavailable, or they couldn’t find it, or they couldn’t supply it.

Well, something surfaced that was kind of remarkable, a copy of which I am providing to you, which are minutes of the certification meeting of the Boeing 737. Well, lo and behold, it turns out that the FAA did question the certification of this aircraft, the single slab rudder, the single actuator, and even suggested that it was prone to a single point failure. Well, it’s pretty obvious that if this document had gotten out officially, it would have been pretty embarrassing to the FAA, and probably to the managers who overruled the guys who figured out that the 737 shouldn’t have been certified this way, so it didn’t get out officially, it got out unofficially.

That’s the problem, you see, with your proposed regulation. Your proposed regulation is a simple attempt to hide the truth from the public, to hide the truth from victims’ families, to hide the truth from the press, to hide the truth from everyone who has to make an intelligent decision about aviation safety.

In short, this regulation is a cruel and arrogant attempt to deny access to the public from the people who are on the public’s payroll to find out whether the job for which Government is being paid is, in fact, being done honestly, accurately and effectively.

I oppose this regulation, because it has been bought and paid for by industry, because it is the FAA’s continuing attempt to hide its ineptitude because it is completely and absolutely unnecessary.

Even the FAA should understand that it is the threat of public disclosure of critical safety information and the legal liability that may result from it that is the most effective tool at implementing aviation safety improvements, not hiding behind some regulatory device to keep the public in the dark.

Read the Constitution.

Very truly yours,
Arthur Alan Wolk

Attorney Arthur Alan Wolk’s Opinion

PHILADELPHIA – (03/23/1999) In response to the NTSB’s March 23, 1999, hearings on the USAir 427 accident, Attorney Arthur Alan Wolk, who has focused his efforts in the field of air crash litigation, issued the following opinion:

The National Transportation Safety Board, which is about to announce its long awaited conclusions on the causes of the crash of USAir 427, which occurred on September 8, 1994, and United 585, which occurred on March 3, 1991, took longer to complete its investigation of these two accidents than it did for Boeing to conceive, design, certify, produce, and field the Boeing 737.

Not only did it take too long, but from statements issued by both the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Administration, it is clear that both of those agencies of government still don’t have a clue either about why the rudder of the Boeing 737 has a mind of its own or the means to fix it. In short, eight years after 25 people were killed in United 585, five years after 132 people were killed in USAir 427, and six years after more than 100 people were killed in Copa 201, the Boeing 737 still is not fixed.

The FAA, in the face of pending recommendations that a dual rudder actuating system be installed in all existing Boeing 737s to prevent the single actuator causing a crash, has said, “There is no data to suggest planes with dual power control units are less prone to an in-flight upset than the 737.” It also pointed out that a 737 “is equipped with a standby rudder system that serves a similar purpose.” This statement demonstrates that the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency of government responsible for ensuring the safety of flight and for certifying the Boeing 737, still doesn’t understand how the rudder control system of that aircraft works. The standby rudder actuator on a Boeing 737 has absolutely no role to play in serving to prevent a rudder hardover caused by an errant rudder power control unit. In fact, because of defects in the standby rudder actuator, it can actually make the situation worse. These statements, then, from the FAA are even more frightening in the face of this lengthy investigation and at least three accidents taking hundreds of lives. It means that the FAA still doesn’t have a clue about the fundamental and basic operation of an aircraft that it certified.

The problem is very simple. The Boeing 737 is the only transport category airplane that has a single actuator for the rudder, which is in violation of the federal regulations which require redundancy. Boeing got around the redundancy requirement by performing an analysis, without flight tests, that established that the chance of failure was so remote, it didn’t have to have a redundant design. The FAA went along with it, and it was wrong. In fact, the FAA and Boeing admit that the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis performed to obtain that certification was wrong. Therefore, certification was wrong. Therefore, the airplane should have been grounded or fixed. It is neither.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that the rudder was the cause of at least three unsolved Boeing 737 rollover accidents in the last decade, the FAA recently granted certification to three new 737 models, the -600, -700 and -800 Series. In a stunning abdication of its responsibility to ensure safety, the FAA granted that certification with, yes, a single rudder actuator in each of those aircraft. In short, the advanced model Boeing 737 being produced at the rate of 24 a month continue to have the same fundamental flaw that the 3,000 existing 737s have — no redundancy in the rudder control system.

The FAA also claims that now pilots are being trained to handle the problem of a runaway rudder. This also demonstrates that the FAA is out of the loop and out of touch with the reality of airline pilot training. The advanced maneuvers training (or upset training, as it has been called by the pilots) presumes that the rudder malfunction no longer exists. In other words, the rudder, which may have gone to full travel and caused the airplane to be upset in the first place, has now returned to its normal position. Unfortunately, when the rudder fails in a Boeing 737, it stays there, so all the upset training and all the advanced maneuvers training in the world won’t protect the crew and passengers of a Boeing 737 with an errant rudder.

The FAA and the NTSB also laud the changes that were recommended by the NTSB and implemented in Boeing 737 rudder control systems. These included an inspection to determine that adverse tolerances in the manufacture of the servo valve in the rudder could not stack up and cause a malfunction, changes in the design of the servo valve purportedly to prevent rudder malfunction, and the addition of a rudder limiter that would keep the rudder from going full travel and, therefore, allow the pilots to regain control using the ailerons on the wings, which could overpower the rudder. Unfortunately, none of those changes either has or will work to prevent an accident under the most critical phases of flight — landing and takeoff.

The rudder limiter is designed not to function at altitudes 700′ above the ground and below on landing and 1,000′ above the ground and below on takeoff. So at a point in time when the crew has the least possible altitude within which to regain control of the aircraft, the potential for rudder malfunction is uncorrected. Even with the current modifications, the United 585 crash in Colorado Springs would still likely have occurred.

There is always a risk when interpretation of safety regulations is stretched, strained, winked at or disregarded, and that is, an accident. How many more accidents? How many more people will die before those who should be held accountable are held accountable?

According to the NTSB, there may be recommendations to split the rudder of the 737, like the 727 rudder, and use two actuators to provide a level of redundancy required by the regulations, and certainly called for by the accident history. The FAA and Boeing decry such a recommendation, claiming that it would harm the systems in the aircraft and be expensive. Neither the agency responsible for safety nor the manufacturer of the aircraft ultimately responsible for safety address the harm to the other set of systems which will result from the failure to implement these necessary modifications, and that is the systems of the human beings aboard these aircraft. It is those systems that need to be protected at all cost.

But what is perhaps most indefensible in this flurry of sound bites and competition among federal agencies to gain the political upper hand of looking like they are doing something to help the public in the face of an inexcusable eight year delay is the abject failure to appreciate how modern technology can make correction of the 737’s flaws far less expensive and less complicated than envisaged or complained of.

We live in a fly-by-wire technology era, where wires instead of hydraulic lines and electric actuators instead of hydraulic actuators are the way aircraft are designed and built. In short, the Boeing 737 can have a second actuator electrically operated and driven and equipped with a comparator, such that if the hydraulic actuator and the electrical actuator don’t agree, the rudder will not move. It’s cheap, it’s simple, it can be implemented relatively quickly, and it can solve the problem.

With regard to the 737 Advanced model aircraft and the certification without rudder activator redundancy, while the NTSB sat back and let it happen, shame on the U.S. Government, shame on the FAA, and shame on the NTSB.

These new airplanes should never have been certificated without a dual rudder actuator, and had the NTSB applied enough pressure, they wouldn’t have been. The NTSB has demonstrated a lack of accuracy and thoroughness in accident investigation historically, but now delay can be added to its list of inadequacies.

It is stunning that the first scanning electron micrographs of the United 585 rudder control servo valve that were obtained by the NTSB, were obtained not as a result of its own metallurgical analysis of this suspect component, but of photographs that were supplied by none other than an expert hired by Arthur Alan Wolk. It is stunning that the NTSB didn’t know until weeks ago that the servo valve of both United 585 and USAir 427 had metal burrs left in them during manufacture that were not in compliance with the drawings; in other words, manufacturing defects, and that those burrs could cause jamming of the slides of the rudder actuator. It is frightening to think that eight years after initiating an investigation into the crashes of three airplanes full of people that the NTSB is just getting around to having a hearing to tell people what everybody in the industry knew within hours of the accidents — they were all caused by the rudder, and if you have an airplane with a single rudder actuator, when the regulations require two, that’s probably why the rudder caused the accident.

The FAA, Boeing and the NTSB say that the necessary changes in the 737 already in the process of being implemented make a safe airplane even safer. Statistically, that’s probably true. After all, 90,000,000 hours and only a few crashes that we know were caused by the rudder. That’s a pretty good record. So, I guess then, we have abandoned the principle that when we actually know of a reason for an aircraft crash, it must be fixed so that others will not lose their lives.

So, really instead of having a little machine that checks your boarding pass when you get on a Boeing 737, each passenger should simply spin a roulette wheel, because that is exactly the gamble every passenger and every crew member takes when he or she gets aboard a Boeing 737 with a single rudder actuator. I suggest your carry-on bag should be a parachute!

Aviation Attorney and Pilot Expert Arthur Alan Wolk weighs in

Aviation attorney and pilot expert, Arthur Alan Wolk, says that if Swissair’s simulator studies, which claim that the crew could not have descended from 33,000′ to land at Halifax in 70 miles, nor landed overweight on the more than 8,000′ of runway available are correct, Swissair needs to change its emergency procedures because that’s why this airplane crashed.

The MD-11, which operated as Swissair Flight 111, was nowhere near maximum takeoff weight at the time it left John F. Kennedy Airport with its relatively short 6-1/2 hour flight. The MD-11 has a range of over 8,000 miles and was making a flight of about half of that to Geneva. Therefore, its weight at the time of takeoff was more on the order of 500,000 pounds than the over 700,000 pounds for a maximum range flight.

At the time the crew first reported an urgent situation, approximately 70 miles from Halifax and at 33,000′, this airplane was only about 50,000 pounds above maximum landing weight, essentially a non-event for that model airplane. The runway requirement for maximum landing weight for an MD-11 is only 6,500′, leaving ample room for any excess distance required for the slight additional weight that Swissair 111 was at the time of the first urgent call to air traffic control. Swissair says in its simulator studies, the airplane could not have been stopped in 8,000′. That is impossible if the simulator was being operated properly, says Wolk.

Swissair also claims that the airplane could not have descended from 33,000′ in time to land at the airport. Wolk says that this statement is absolutely false. The emergency procedure that exists for the MD-11 would bring the airplane down from 33,000′ to sea level in less than 5 minutes, a descent rate that would be adequate even to land the airplane at Halifax if it started such a descent a 30 miles out, says Wolk.

If Swissair’s emergency procedures are such that the crew thought they could not have descended from altitude, nor landed on the runway at the weight Swissair 111 was at the time it reported smoke in the cockpit, then Swissair’s emergency procedures and training need to be changed at once.

Every U.S. MD-11 flight crew Wolk has spoken to has confirmed his opinion and calculations that there would have been no impediment whatsoever for the aircraft to have landed at Halifax in less than 10 minutes from the time the crew first reported smoke. Therefore, Swissair’s flight crew could very well have been a victim of Swissair’s own inadequate emergency procedures training, if Swissair is to be believed.

Investigators need to examine the emergency procedures established by Swissair in its procedures manual to see if adequate provision has been made for dealing with the very real emergency of smoke in the cockpit.

Kapton a hazardous wiring for use in aircraft

Aviation attorney, Arthur Alan Wolk, who has done substantial research in the field of aircraft fires, notes that the United States Navy refused to allow the continued use of Kapton in Navy fighters because of its poor performance, specifically its propensity for arcing and the propagation of dangerous fire-producing sparks. The FAA was made aware long before this crash that Kapton was a hazardous wiring for use in aircraft, yet did not mandate more stringent inspections of aircraft in which Kapton was used as electrical insulation.

Kapton was described by DuPont, its manufacturer, as having “outstanding thermal, mechanical, chemical and electrical properties.” In fact, Boeing engineers concluded that Kapton was completely unsuitable because when wires arced within the Kapton insulation, Kapton became a carbon track, allowing further propagation of the electrical arcing, much like a dynamite fuse.

This clearly made Kapton a bomb waiting to go off in any aircraft in which it was utilized.

It is indefensible that both the FAA and the manufacturer of this aircraft would permit the use of electrical wiring in a civilian, passenger carrying airliner, knowing that in an aircraft in which the crew is equipped with an ejection seat, the material was found to be unsuitable because of its fire and arcing propagation characteristics, says Wolk.

This will be undoubtedly a very ugly and embarrassing investigation for the industry and a further embarrassment to the FAA, which already has thousands of lives etched on its tombstone of ineptitude, says Wolk.

MD-11 plane got 4 FAA-mandated “Airworthiness Directives” in 5 years

PHILADELPHIA – (09/04/1998) Preliminary information surrounding the crash of Swissair Flight 111 in Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia on Wednesday, September 2, 1998, raises serious concerns, says aviation attorney and crash investigator, Arthur Alan Wolk, Esq. Specifically, Wolk is worried about the quality of FAA oversight with regard to the plane involved — an MD-11. “Since 1993,” says the nationally-known aviation attorney, “the MD-11 has had four FAA-mandated airworthiness directives (demands for a critical examination). Inspections of the wire bundles were ordered to avoid sparks, fire and, in fact, smoke in the cockpit.”

“If there are four separate areas of the airplane needing examination to avoid electrical fires, the FAA should realize that many other areas would also require inspection. I believe the MD-11 may have given warnings prior to the outbreak of fire. It is likely that the way its wiring bundles were assembled had created chaffing which resulted in sparks leading to fire,” adds Wolk.

According to Wolk, who examined the four airworthiness directives, the same FAA engineer was responsible for each one. “Why didn’t it occur to him,” asks Wolk, “that if the airplane has four problematic areas of wiring, that it may well have four hundred areas requiring a careful examination?”

Wolk also says investigators need to evaluate the emergency procedures that are being recommended to flight crews in the event of smoke and fire in an airplane. “Flight crews should be clearly told that smoke should always be taken seriously. Any smoke, however slight it might appear, should be considered as a potentially serious fire and warrant an emergency decent to landing regardless of the aircraft’s weight. It appears that it took 16 minutes from the time the Swissair crew said ‘PAN” (which is considered an urgent call – not an emergency or distress call) until the aircraft was lost on radar at approximately 8000’. This indicates that the aircraft was descending at less than 2000’/minute, which is a normal and leisurely descent, rather than an emergency one. Unfortunately, while it is hindsight, an emergency descent at more than 6000’/minute might have saved precious time and could have gotten the airplane to the airport.”

Wolk summarizes, “In my view the crash scene isn’t the only thing that warrants an in-depth investigation. The quality of the FAA’s oversight should be investigated and, if found faulty, fixed – before yet another air tragedy that could easily have been avoided occurs.”

But Nationally-Known Aviation Attorney says, “It’s too little too late.”

PHILADELPHIA – (01/15/1997) What is perhaps the most appalling irony yet in the Boeing 737 air crash investigation debacle, is the announcement today by Al Gore that Boeing has agreed to modify their 737 rudder control to prevent rudder hardovers and the resulting complete lack of control of the aircraft. Nationally-known aviation attorney, Arthur Wolk, made the recommendations being discussed today five years ago.

Says Wolk, “While pronouncing an airplane that has taken hundreds of lives from this defect known to Boeing and Parker Hannifin (the rudder control system maker) for 25 years as safe, the government has made it look as though Boeing, in an interest solely motivated by public safety, has decided to make changes which are unnecessary.” “In fact,” continues Wolk, “without these changes, the Boeing 737 is a time bomb, with every flight holding the potential for a rudder hardover, a loss of control, and a crash killing all aboard.”

“It is sickening that Boeing, which has taken the position in the litigation that has arisen from the crashes of United 585 in Colorado Springs and USAir 427 in Pittsburgh that the rudder had nothing to do with either of these accidents, is now being lauded for taking steps which should have been taken when the airplane was certified in the late 1960s to prevent these accidents from happening,” says Wolk.

“Knowing of the hundreds of warnings of accidents waiting to happen in Boeing 737s over the years, Boeing and Parker Hannifin allowed two planes to crash, killing all aboard, and possibly a third, while denying that the rudder could ever cause such a calamity,” says Wolk.

Wolk concludes, “What the NTSB, the FAA and Boeing are conceding now is that the airplane’s rudder control is unsafe. What makes this announcement so appalling is that the airplane still flies every minute of every day while the government and the manufacturers know that an accident can happen at anytime. This is unprecedented in aviation history.”