The National Transportation Safety Board will begin work Monday to recover the wreckage of a Boeing 737-200 cargo plane that crashed in the water at Mamala Bay in July, injuring the two pilots on board.
Weather permitting, a crew of 40 will start efforts to retrieve parts of the plane that may help federal investigators determine what caused the crash, said NTSB senior air safety investigator Lorenda Ward at a news conference Saturday at a state Department of Transportation airport fire station.
The 46-year-old Transair aircraft, operated by Rhoades Aviation, had left the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in the early morning hours of July 2 and was headed for Kahului when, soon after takeoff, the pilots observed “anomalies in both engines” and were forced to ditch the plane off Kalaeloa, Ward said.
Once in the water, the pilots were able to escape through the cockpit windows, she said.
U.S. Coast Guard, Honolulu Fire Department and DOT personnel assisted with their rescue, with one of the pilots, age 50, airlifted from the water at 2:51 a.m. A few minutes later the Coast Guard rescued the other pilot, 58, who was holding onto the tail of the downed plane before it sank.
The older pilot was transferred to a hospital in critical condition and the other in serious condition, but Ward said both have been doing fine since.
The wreckage recovery crew will use a barge and a research ship to lift the two main sections of the aircraft, she said. Usually planes break into smaller and more manageable fragments when they hit the water, according to Ward, but in this case there are heavier, intact segments, including one that weighs 97,000 pounds.
“What is unique about this recovery is that we potentially have two pieces of the airplane,” Ward said. “When the plane was landed in the water, it essentially broke into two very large pieces. So instead of a fragmented airplane, we’re going to be lifting two heavy pieces.”
Once the recovery process begins, the engines are expected to be brought to shore within a few days, while the rest of the wreckage will be removed from the ocean within a week, she added.
Although NTSB officials already conducted interviews, reviewed the plane’s maintenance records and collected air traffic control data during their investigation, Ward did not provide a preliminary cause for the crash. Recovering parts of the wreckage, notably the plane’s recorders, will help investigators determine the circumstances surrounding the incident.
“The recorders are important. The flight data recorder, or the FDR, will provide us with important information about the performance of the airplane, and the cockpit voice recorders, or the CVR, gives us potential insight into the challenges the crew were encountering and how they may have handled those challenges,” Ward said.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the Coast Guard have limited access to the recovery area so the crews can work safely. The wreckage is too deep for divers, so a remotely operated vehicle will be used instead. A crane on the barge will be used for lifting wreckage out of the water.
After removal and detailed documentation of the recovered pieces, they will be transported to different places for examination. The engines, manufactured by Pratt &Whitney, will be shipped to the mainland to be torn down, while the
recorders will be taken to an NTSB laboratory in Washington, D.C., where they will be “cleaned, dried and downloaded,” Ward said.
The fuselage will stay in Hawaii.
A thorough investigation of the recovered wreckage could take one to two years. Transair’s insurance company is footing the bill for the recovery effort, Ward said.
The interisland cargo company has been operating in Hawaii since 1982.
In an investigation unrelated to the crash, the FAA on July 16 grounded Rhoades Aviation’s one remaining 737 as a result of “deficiencies” in the company’s safety and maintenance practices. Rhoades had been under investigation since last fall, according to the FAA, and the agency told the company about two weeks before the crash that it planned to revoke its authority to do maintenance inspections.
