2008: Air New Zealand Crash
November 27, 2023
By AHNZ
Today in history, 28 November, 2008, an Air New Zealand A320 passenger plane dived into the French Mediterranean. Remarkably enough this was 29 years to the day that Air New Zealand put a passenger plane into Mt Erebus in Antarctica. So if you’re superstitious perhaps stay away from government airlines for today?
The Labour 5.0 Government pumped $885 million in bailout money into the airline for an 82% majority ownership on 14 January, 2002. Ref. Government bailout of Air NZ complete, NZ Herald, Wayback Machine
National 5.0 reduced State ownership to 53% in 2013. So, during 2008 we may fairly blame the Government for what their airline paid for with our stolen money does. Ref. NZ government sells 20% of Air New Zealand for $324 million, Sydney Morning Herald (2013,) Wayback Machine
On that day in 2008 the plane was conducting a test flight prior to handing the plane back to Air New Zealand control after a lease. Of the 7 crew all were killed and 5 of these were New Zealanders. The pilot, Norbert Käppel, and his co-pilot were both German. The Kiwis were Brian Horrell, Murray White, Michael Gyles, Jeremy Cook, and Noel Marsh. Ref. Wiki
Seems that the process of re-painting the Air New Zealand branding on the fuselage made the plane into a death trap waiting to be sprung.
“In 2009 Air New Zealand marked the 30th anniversary of the Erebus disaster and the first anniversary of the A320 accident. Events marking the latter included a service in Perpignan, where a memorial plaque made of pounamu (greenstone) and local stone was unveiled.” – Air New Zealand A320 crashes in France, NZ History.govt
“Mr Fyfe said the interim report also suggested there was a problem with the angle-of-attack indication system, which warns pilots when a plane is flying too slowly and is in danger of stalling.” – Too low, too slow – Air NZ crash transcripts, NZ Herald (2009)
“A simple bubble level in the cockpit would inform the flight crew of the pitch of the plane when the redundant, megabuck electronic system failed.” – Chuck Pont, Facebook (2021)
Having sanded off the old paintwork the process improvised was to water-blast off the residue which was against proper procedure. Water was blasted into the angle of attack probe housings. The water froze at altitude and disabled the sensors which would have prevented the crash.
The flight crew went on to try a low-speed and low-altitude test of the plane and were not alerted to the danger due to the disabled probes. So, crash.
So, it was a successful test of the stall-warning system. It tested negative. Expensive way to find out though eh?
According to the episode Imperfect Pitch from the TV show Air Crash Investigations the pilots were deliberately trying to crash so they could experience the automation system righting their wrongs. The final ‘wrong’ came after a series of attempts to ‘aggravate’ and confound the machine which were replied to by the plane fixing them. After enough of these cause-and-effect back-and-forth exchanges the pilots must have been feeling comparatively relaxed about dialing up doom. Reminds me of those Boston Dynamics videos where robots are trying to perform manual tasks while men move the target objects or beat the robots with bats or even shoot them. If the machine were a human they wouldn’t tolerate the abuse and we feel as if they might give up on their task and let the human have his way. In this case the plane was under so much artificial stress and pressure that, in a way, it committed suicide in service to its masters’ wishes just like the bomb disarming robot in The Simpsons movie.
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Image ref. Erebus wreckage on the ice alongside Mediterranean wreckage on the water
Ref. Imperfect Pitch, Air Crash Investigations (2014.) Video below
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