Swissair Flight 111

Aircraft The aircraft involved was a seven-year-old McDonnell Douglas MD-11 and registered as HB-IWF. The cabin was configured with 241 passenger seats. First- and business-class seats were equipped with in-seat in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems from Interactive Flight Technologies. It allowed the first- and business-class passengers to select their own movies and games and to gamble. The system was installed in business class one year before the incident, between 21 August and 9 September 1997. It was installed in first class five months later, in February 1998, due to delivery delays. The first officer, 36-year-old Stefan Löw, had logged approximately 4,800 hours of total flying time, including 230 hours on the MD-11. He was an instructor on the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 and the Airbus A320. From 1982 to 1990, Löw had been a pilot in the Swiss Air Force. The cabin crew comprised a maître de cabine (purser) and eleven flight attendants. All crew members on board Flight 111 were qualified, certified, and trained in accordance with Swiss regulations under the Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA). == Flight timeline ==

. Pictured is the community's iconic Peggys Point Lighthouse in 2005, with St. Margarets Bay seen below the lighthouse on the right. Flight 111 took off from New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport at 20:18 EDT (00:18 UTC) on 2 September 1998. Four minutes later, the odour returned and smoke became visible, prompting the pilots to make a "pan-pan" radio call to Moncton air traffic control (ATC), the area control center (ACC) station in charge of air traffic over Nova Scotia. The pan-pan call indicated that there was an urgency due to smoke in the cockpit but did not declare an emergency as denoted by a "mayday" call. The crew requested a diversion to Boston ( away) before accepting Moncton ATC's offer of radar vectors to the closer Halifax International Airport in Enfield, Nova Scotia, away. The aircraft flight data recorder stopped operating at 22:25:40 ADT (01:25:40 UTC), followed one second later by the cockpit voice recorder. The aircraft's transponder briefly resumed transmission of secondary radar returns from 22:25:50 to 22:26:04 ADT (01:25:50 to 01:26:04 UTC), at which time the aircraft's altitude was . After this, the aircraft could be tracked only through primary radar, which does not provide altitude information. ==Victims==

There were 132 Americans (including one employee each from Delta Air Lines and United Airlines), 41 Swiss (including the 13 crew members), 30 French, 4 Canadians, 3 Britons, 3 Italians, 2 Greeks, 2 Lebanese, and 1 each from Afghanistan, China, Germany, India, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, St. Kitts and Nevis, Mexico, Sweden, and Yugoslavia, and 4 other passengers on board. Epidemiologists Jonathan Mann and Mary Lou Clements-Mann, a married couple who were both prominent researchers of HIV/AIDS, died in the crash. == Post-crash response ==

Search and rescue operation The search and rescue (SAR) operation was code-named Operation Persistence and was launched immediately by Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Halifax (JRCC Halifax). The search and rescue operation consisted of 400 Royal Canadian Air Force personnel, 700 Canadian Army personnel; the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG); Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary (CCGA) resources; and 450 Royal Canadian Mounted Police and more than 2400 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel who were participating as part of Operation Homage. The crash site's proximity to Halifax placed it within one hour's sailing time of ships docked at Canada's largest naval base, CFB Halifax, and one of the largest CCG bases in Canada, the CCG Regional Headquarters in Dartmouth. Calls went out immediately, and ships sailed directly to St. Margaret's Bay. The provincial ambulance service, Emergency Health Services (EHS), received word of the crash at 22:39 AT and ordered 21 emergency units from Halifax, the South Shore, and the Annapolis Valley to respond. An EHS helicopter was also sent to the crash site, and the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax was put on emergency alert. The emergency health services were stood down around 3:30 the next morning, as expectations of finding survivors diminished. The land search, including shoreline searching, was the responsibility of Halifax Regional Search and Rescue. The organization was responsible for all ground operations, including military operations and other ground search and rescue teams. Search and recovery operation By the afternoon of 3 September, it was apparent that there were no survivors from the crash. On the morning of 4 September, JRCC Halifax de-tasked dedicated SAR assets and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) were given control of the scene. The aircraft broke up on impact with the water, and most of the debris sank to the ocean floor at a depth of . Some debris was found floating in the crash area, and over the following weeks, debris washed up on nearby shorelines. searches for Swissair Flight 111 debris on 14 September, with (centre), (right), and a (rear). With CAF divers (navy clearance divers, port inspection divers, ship's team divers, and Army combat divers) working on the recovery, the Government of Canada requested a larger dedicated salvage recovery vessel from the Government of the United States. was tasked to the recovery effort, arriving from Philadelphia on 9 September. Among her crew were 32 salvage divers, and she welcomed two teams of Canadian Navy clearance divers that flew across Canada from Fleet Diving Unit (FDU) Pacific. assisted in the underwater search phase of the Swissair Flight 111 crash near Halifax, Nova Scotia. The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) were found by the Canadian submarine Okanagan using sonar to detect the underwater locator beacon signals and were quickly retrieved by Canadian Navy divers (the FDR on 6 September and the CVR on 11 September 1998). Both had stopped recording when the aircraft lost electrical power at approximately , 5 minutes and 37 seconds before impact. . On 2 October 1998, the TSB initiated a heavy lift operation to retrieve major portions of the wreckage from deep water before expected winter storms began. By 21 October, an estimated 27% of the wreckage was recovered. At that point in the investigation, the crash was generally believed to have been caused by faulty wiring in the cockpit after the IFE system started to overheat. The TSB released its preliminary report on 30 August 2000 and the final report in 2003. Jerome Hauer, the head of the emergency management task force of New York City, praised the swift actions of Swissair and codeshare partner Delta Air Lines in responding to the accident; he had criticized Trans World Airlines in its response to the TWA Flight 800 crash in 1996. == Investigation ==

Identification of victims The RCMP medical examiners positively identified most of the bodies within ten weeks of the accident. Due to extreme impact forces, only one body was identifiable by sight. DNA profiling was used to identify approximately one hundred bodies. At the time, it was "the largest DNA identification project ever undertaken in Canada". The RCMP contacted relatives of victims to request medical histories and dental records. They were also asked to provide blood samples for genetic matching in the DNA identification of the victims. About 90 bodies were identified by the medical examiners using dental records; owing to the large number of ante-mortem (before death) dental X-rays available to the examiners, these bodies were identified by late October 1998. Fingerprints and ante-mortem X-rays were used to identify around 30 bodies. As each piece of wreckage was brought in, it was carefully cleaned with fresh water, sorted, and weighed. The item was then placed in a specific area of a hangar at CFB Shearwater, based on a grid system representing the various sections of the plane. All items deemed insignificant to the crash were stored with similar items in large boxes. When a box was full, it was weighed and moved to a custom-built temporary structure (J-Hangar) on a discontinued runway for long-term storage. If deemed significant to the investigation, the item was documented, photographed, and kept in the active examination hangar. Cockpit recordings The cockpit voice recorder used a recording tape that operated on a 30-minute loop. It therefore retained only that half-hour of the flight before the recorders failed, six minutes before the crash. and thus were not publicly disclosed, although the air traffic control recordings are less strictly privileged: section 29 of the same act provides only that they may not be used in certain legal proceedings. The air traffic control transcripts were released within days of the crash in 1998 and the air traffic control audio was released in May 2007, following a ruling by the Federal Court of Appeal. Several key minutes of the air traffic control audio can be found on the Toronto Star web site. In 1999, an article in The Wall Street Journal alleged that the pilots disagreed about whether to dump fuel or descend straight to Halifax. Based on internal TSB summaries of the CVR recording, the Journal claimed that co-pilot Löw suggested steps aimed at a quick landing, which were ignored or rejected by Captain Zimmermann. Swissair and Canadian investigators would not comment on the accuracy of the reporting, with a TSB spokesman deeming it "a reporter's interpretation of a summary document of what might have been" on the CVR. Probable cause The Transportation Safety Board of Canada investigation identified eleven causes and contributing factors of the crash in its final report. The first and most prominent was the following: Investigators identified evidence of arcing in wiring of the in-flight entertainment network (IFEN), but this did not trip the circuit breakers, which were not designed to trip on arcing. The investigation was unable to determine whether this arc was the "lead event" that was assumed to have ignited the flammable covering on MPET insulation blankets that quickly spread across other flammable materials. Installation of IFEN at Swissair was rushed and violated various FAA certification procedures. According to Swissair Operational Engineering, IFEN added more than of weight to the plane. Safety recommendations The TSB made nine recommendations relating to changes in aircraft materials (testing, certification, inspection, and maintenance), electrical systems, and flight data capture, as both flight recorders had stopped when they lost power six minutes before impact. General recommendations were also made regarding improvements in checklists and in fire-detection and fire-fighting equipment and training. These recommendations led to widespread changes in Federal Aviation Administration standards, principally affecting wiring and fire hardening. == Legacy ==

Valuables The plane's manifest indicated the presence of a significant amount of valuables, including of diamonds from the "Nature of Diamonds" exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, of watches, of jewellery, and 49 kg of cash intended for a U.S. bank in Geneva. Two paintings, Le Peintre (The Painter) by Pablo Picasso and an unidentified work, were also onboard the aircraft and destroyed in the accident. Le Peintre was estimated at in value. Insurer Lloyd's of London reportedly paid out an estimated $300 million for the lost diamonds and jewels. The company applied for a treasure-trove license from the Nova Scotia government to search the crash site but faced opposition from victims' relatives, leading to the withdrawal of the application. The offer was rejected in favour of a $19.8 billion suit against Swissair and DuPont, the supplier of the Mylar insulation sheathing. A US federal court ruled against punitive damages in February 2002. The resulting compensations for one group of plaintiffs totaled over $13 million. Memorials and tributes , memorial A non-denominational memorial service was held on the grounds of East St. Margaret's Elementary School in Indian Harbour on 9 September 1998. Among those in attendance were 175 relatives of the crash victims, Swiss president Flavio Cotti, Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien and Nova Scotia premier Russell MacLellan. A memorial service was also held in Zürich on 11 September 1998. The following year, another memorial was held in Nova Scotia. Two memorials to those who died in the crash were established by the Government of Nova Scotia. One is to the east of the crash site at The Whalesback, a promontory north of Peggys Cove. The second is a more private but much larger commemoration located west of the crash site near Bayswater Beach Provincial Park on the Aspotogan Peninsula in Bayswater. Here, the unidentified remains of the victims are interred. A fund was established to maintain the memorials, and the government passed an act to recognize the memorials. Various other charitable funds were also created, including one in the name of a young victim from Louisiana, Robert Martin Maillet, which provided money for children in need, and one in the name of Robert's mother, Karen E. Maillet-Domingue (also a victim), which granted scholarships. Aftermath and effects on the industry After the crash of Flight 111, the flight designator for Swissair's New York–Geneva route was changed to SR139, although the route was still operated by MD-11 aircraft. The crash of Flight 111 was a severe blow to Swissair, and the airline suffered even more loss following the accident, particularly as the in-flight entertainment system that was blamed for causing the accident had been installed on the aircraft to attract more passengers. It was disconnected following the Transportation Safety Board discovery on 29 October 1998 and eventually removed from both Swissair fleets of 15 MD-11s and 3 Boeing 747-300s. Swissair later went bankrupt shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001, an event that caused a significant and widespread disruption to the aviation transportation industry. Following the bankruptcy of Swissair in 2001, their international traffic rights were passed to Crossair, who took over Swissair's route network and fleet and began operating flights as the newly renamed Swiss International Air Lines, changing the flight designator for the New York–Geneva route to LX023. The MD-11 was retired from the Swiss fleet in 2004, and the flight today is operated by an Airbus A330-300. ==See also==