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6th September, 2010
DUBAI: The cockpit of a United Parcel Service 747 cargo plane filled with smoke as pilots fought to maintain altitude and return to Dubai, where the plane crashed and both crew members died, a civil aviation statement said on Sunday.
The United Arab Emirates General Civil Aviation Authority said in the statement that investigators have recovered a cockpit voice recorder from the aircraft, which went down on Friday inside a military base.
Twenty-two minutes after takeoff, “information was received from Bahrain that the aircraft was returning to Dubai Airport with smoke in the cockpit,” the GCAA statement said. The plane was “unable to maintain altitude and requested the airport for landing,” it said.
The aircraft’s approach, however, was high, and it flew over the airport and made a right turn. It then quickly shed altitude and radar contact was lost around 7:42 PM (1542 GMT), less than an hour after the plane had departed, the GCAA said.
“The investigation team recovered the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) approximately 6 hours after the accident,” it said, and the team “is continuing the recovery effort to locate the digital flight data recorder (DFDR).” Both pilots were killed in the crash, UPS said.
“UPS can now confirm that two of our crewmembers, Captain Doug Lampe of Louisville, Kentucky, and First Officer Matthew Bell of Sanford, Florida, lost their lives in the crash of Flight 6” in Dubai, the company said. Lamp had worked for UPS since 1995, while Bell was with the company since 2006, it said.
There have been no reports of casualties on the ground. Some areas around the military base where the plane crashed were uninhabited, but the death toll could have been much higher if the plane had come down in a nearby residential area.
The UPS statement said the aircraft, a Boeing 747-400, was three years old and “was up to date on all maintenance, having just completed a major inspection in June 2010.”
The company has dispatched a team to Dubai that “will cooperate with authorities in the investigation,” it said. The GCAA statement said that a US National Transportation Safety Board team would arrive in the UAE on Sunday to assist with the investigation.
In October 2009 a Sudanese Boeing 707 cargo plane owned by Azza Transport in Khartoum crashed outside Dubai, near the emirate of Sharjah, killing all six Sudanese crew members aboard.
Sharjah, the third largest emirate after Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is especially used by low-cost airlines and air cargo carriers.
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