Were airport managers to blame for a plane collision in Milan which killed 118 people? Next week a court will decide, reports Paddy Agnew.
At 8.10 a.m. on October 8th, 2001, visibility at Milan's Linate Airport was between 50 and 100 metres, thanks to a typical Milanese fog. That was the first problem. Alleged infrastructural shortcomings and human error did the rest.
Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) flight SK686 was hurtling down the runway at 270.5 kilometres per hour when, to their horror, the pilot and co-pilot of the SAS Boeing MD-87 suddenly found that a Cessna private jet was cutting across the runway in front of them. Just before the Boeing smashed into the Cessna 525-A, breaking it into three separate pieces, the cockpit voice recorder (CVC) registered an "unintelligible exclamation" from one of the Boeing pilots.
At the moment of impact, the SAS Boeing still had its wheels on the ground, gaining speed for lift-off. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the Boeing pilot attempted to the get the plane airborne, even succeeding in getting it just 35 feet off the ground for 12 agonising seconds.
The damage done by the impact with the Cessna, however, not only made the Boeing impossible to handle but it also caused "thrust reduction" with debris from the Cessna being ingested by the Boeing engines. After 12 seconds, the Boeing smashed on to the runway again, with the pilot hitting the engine reverse levers and the brakes as hard as he could.
At this stage, the Boeing's wing-tip was dragging in the grass, making it impossible to control the plane, which then slewed off the runway, heading straight for a baggage-handling hangar just 460 metres away. When the Boeing hit the hangar, it was travelling at 257.6 k.p.h. On impact, it burst into flames, turning the hangar into an inferno.
All passengers and crew members on both planes, plus four airport workers in the hangar, were killed instantly. In all, 118 people lost their lives. Among the dead were Italians, Danes, Swedes, Finns, Norwegians, a Romanian, a Briton, an American and a South African.
The Linate Airport crash was Italy's worst civil aviation disaster. Two and a half years later, a Milan court is about to give its judgment on four out of 11 people originally charged with manslaughter and negligence in relation to the disaster. In the dock in the Milan trial are Sandro Gualano, former managing director of ENAV, the authority responsible for aviation safety and security, along with Francesco Federico and Vincenzo Fusco, then the heads of Milan's two airports, and Paolo Zucchetti, then head of air traffic control in Milan.
In summing up her case against the defendants early last month, public prosecutor Celestina Gravina requested an eight-year prison sentence for three of the men, while asking for a sentence of three years and 10 months for Paolo Zucchetti. Gravina accused all four of "grave professional incompetence", arguing that they had failed entirely to deal with the airport's manifest shortcomings, especially in relation to updating equipment.
Next week, the Milan court will give its verdict. Yet the case that Linate Airport suffered from serious infrastructural shortcomings has already been emphatically argued by ANSV (Agenzia Nazionale per la Sicurezza del Volo), the national accident investigation and prevention authority, which in February produced its own non-binding, non-penally relevant "final report".
Nervous fliers would do well to give the ANSV report a miss. It concludes that the accident was caused by a series of factors, the most obvious being that the Cessna pilot got himself on to entirely the wrong runway.
Among the elements that contributed to this human error were: (1) the fog; (2) the fact that the accident happened at a time of high traffic volume; (3) the lack of adequate "visual aids" on the runways, such as flashing "traffic" lights, stop signs and other directions painted on the tarmac; (4) the Cessna pilot's lack of qualifications for flying in conditions of reduced visibility; (5) the use of "non-standard phraseology" and of Italian rather than English in the communications between the control tower and the various pilots, leading to misunderstandings; (6) the failure of control power personnel to insist on "standard read-back procedure" when issuing instructions to the pilots: and (7) the fact that the ASMI (aerodrome surveillance monitoring indicator) ground radar had reportedly been out of action since November 29th, 1999.
In its conclusions, the ANSV report comments: "It can be stated that the system in place at Milan's Linate Airport was not geared to trap [catch and prevent] misunderstandings, let alone inadequate procedures, blatant human errors and faulty airport layout."
In the wake of this tragedy, Linate's procedures have indeed been tightened. The ground radar system has been re-installed, lights and signs along taxi-ways have been reactivated or replaced and confusing aiport maps have been redrawn.
For the relatives of the victims and indeed for the one survivor of the crash, baggage-handler Pasquale Padovano, those changes have come too late. Heavily disfigured by burns suffered in the crash, Padovano was in court last month for Gravina's summing-up.
"A guy who goes out and kills just one person can get up to 30 years. Yet, even if these people did not mean to do it, they still killed 118. Thinking about it, I'd have to say that an eight-year sentence is nothing," commented Padovano.
Padovano and the relatives of the victims are motivated by more than a sense of personal loss and pain. Twenty days after the crash, prosecutor Gravina had put the telephones of senior ENAV figures under surveillance. When, in the time- honoured Italian way, transcripts of conversations between ENAV executives were leaked to the media, relatives of the victims became incensed.
For example, as the judicial investigation into the disaster got underway, what were the concerns of the ENAV management? One senior executive offered a neat riposte: "I'm certain that our man is worried not so much about what has happened as about where it could all lead to."
From the transcripts, it appeared that senior ENAV figures were more concerned about which set of friends would be awarded public contracts, about ongoing tax-evasion schemes, about maintaining clientelist relationships with their political masters, about finding jobs for the children of friends of friends, about bribes paid by this guy to that, and generally about damage limitation. Only rarely does the fate of the 118 dead feature.
In an outspoken leader at the time, Rome daily La Repubblica compared the Linate tragedy to the infamous "Tangentopoli" (Bribesville) scandals of the early 1990s, commenting: "The whole long story of Tangentopoli was littered with scumbag behaviour but the spectacle of such total cynicism and moral insensibility as this touches an all-time low."
The centre-right government of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi offered its own judgment of the ENAV authority when, in February 2002, it sacked the ENAV board, putting the whole authority into the hands of a single managing director, Massimo Verrazzani, appointed by the treasury department.
As the relatives wait for final sentencing, due next Friday, they claim they are not looking for revenge. Ivana Caffimotta, vice-president of the Relatives of the Victims Association, put it this way in a recent comment: "I'm not disappointed about the prosecution's request for only eight-year sentences. What we want, above all, is to know that those people whose business it is to safeguard flight safety are diligent and precise in their work."