Safety Board Begins Probe Of Crash
The death toll from a commuter plane crash on Monday near Atlanta rose to five Tuesday, as investigators began combing through the wreckage for clues about what caused the left engine to give out before the crash in a hayfield. Twenty-four people remarkably survived.
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that part of a blade had snapped off the left propeller of the Embraer 120 Brasilia aircraft. On Aug. 3 a propeller blade broke off another Embraer 120 Brasilia before it landed safely at Luxembourg Airport. The safety board is helping investigate that incident.
The NTSB also started analyzing data Tuesday from the plane’s black box, which holds information on up to 50 facets of the plane’s flight path before it crashed. They also recovered the box that contains the cockpit voice recorder.
The safety board’s investigation will include records of the plane as well as the operator of the aircraft, Atlantic Southeast Airlines, an Atlantabased marketing partner of Delta Air Lines.
The NTSB also customarily researches the background of the flight crew. The pilot of flight 7529, Edwin C. Gannaway, died in the crash, but his efforts to soften the impact were cited by surviving passengers as the reason they were still alive.
The Federal Aviation Administration said there were no records of any incident or accident involving Gannaway or enforcement actions against him. He had about 10,000 hours’ flying experience. The co-pilot, Matthew Warmerdam, survived the crash.
After the crash, passengers spoke of seeing the left propeller of the twin-engine turboprop being ripped apart, making this crash similar to one in April 1991, when an Embraer 120 Brasilia flown by the same airline crashed in Georgia and killed 23 people, including former Sen. John G. Tower of Texas.
That crash, the safety board found, was caused by the failure of a worn part in the Hamilton Standard 14RF-9 four-blade propeller control unit, the hub that controls the angle of the blades. The blades measure more than 10 feet in diameter, and the entire unit weighs 230 pounds.
After that crash, the safety board issued several recommendations to the FAA. The FAA’s response to one recommendation in particular - that it issue a directive to ensure that a specific part of the propeller unit is checked periodically - has been “unacceptable,” according to records.
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