Sunday, August 28, 2011

Investigators may spend another week at Resolute Bay crash site: Transportation Safety Board.

A week after First Air flight 6560 crashed near the Resolute Bay airport on August 20, investigators with the Transportation Safety Board continue to comb the crash site to gather as much information as possible about wreckage and are likely to spend another week there.

“We’re recovering (items), and documenting photographically the site,” said Transportation Safety Board spokesperson John Cottreau in an interview from Resolute Bay. “We’re identifying parts of interest that we want to take for further study and our team is transporting those to take back to our TSB laboratory in Ottawa for a more thorough analysis.”

Three people survived the crash that killed 12 people.

Cottreau couldn’t say if the TSB will actually reconstruct parts of the Boeing 737-200C aircraft to see what went wrong Aug. 20 — as has been done in some other air crashes.

“It’s really too early to say what measures will have to be taken for the investigator in charge and his crew to get an understanding of what happened at the time,” Cottreau said. “That still needs to be thought out and decided on.”

But the black boxes containing voice and flight data, retrieved shortly after the crash, have been listened to, although the recordings of conversations that went on in the cockpit are protected, and won’t come out until the final TSB report, and then, only if the information they contain is important to the investigation, he said.

That final report could take as long as a year to produce.

“We’re going to take the time we need to do a thorough report and to answer the three questions for us and for everybody: what happened, why did it happen and what can we learn to help us make sure it never happens again. We are going to do our very best to find out the answers to those three questions.”

While some media reports suggested the TSB had focused on the weather in its initial report Cottreau says the TSB has made no report or statement about meteorological conditions at the time of the crash.

For now, he said investigators are focusing entirely on gathering as much data as they can.

“We’re not concentrating on any analysis yet. Once we leave the site, we want to be sure that we have everything we need to do a thorough analysis. That is consuming us right now,” Cottreau said.

Twenty-three investigators are now at the site of the crash. This number includes investigators from First Air, the United States National Transportation Safety Board and from Boeing, the company that manufactured the 737-200C.

The crash site continues to be a hazardous site to work in due to high winds that can blow sharp metal fragments around, Cottreau said.

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