Plane wreckage, crash site pose unique challenges for investigators
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Three investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board began ground work Thursday to investigate a deadly plane crash near Honolulu’s airport.
The team is made up of an investigator, senior systems engineer, and office chief who will be looking at three primary areas: mechanical issues, human performance, and weather.
“Right now, at this early juncture, nothing has been eliminated at this point. However, we are putting a big emphasis on the engineering portion of this, the airworthiness,” said Clint Johnson, chief of the NTSB Alaska Regional Office, which also oversees Hawaii.
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On Tuesday, Dec. 17, just after 3 p.m., a Kamaka Air Cessna Caravan 208 slammed into a vacant building near Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, killing two people on board.
Ahead of the impact, the pilot notified the tower that they were out of control. The aircraft then suddenly turned and hit the structure.
Johnson explained, “Typically after departure, this airplane would turn to the right. That’s what they were anticipating. However, that was obviously not the case. The air traffic controller questioned the pilot. The pilot indicated that there was a mechanical issue as far as control of the airplane, and then obviously the left turn steepened, and unfortunately loss of control into the building behind us here.”
Officials said the crash caused extensive damage that impacts their investigation in several ways.
“We’re working in a building that has been compromised as far as the structural integrity, so we’re having to approach this much more cautiously than we would if it was out in the middle of a field,” Johnson said.
The airplane wreckage is also highly fragmented, complicating the investigation.
“A majority of the wreckage went over the top of the building and into the parking lot. However, we need to be able to recover all those parts and pieces, so without a doubt we have some challenges here that we don’t normally work with,” he added.
The team will document the crash site and the wreckage, then the plane and debris will be moved to a secure facility where, with the help of a Cessna investigator, they will attempt to reassemble the plane.
“We’re going to try and lay this airplane out and see if there was a mechanical issue, either with the airframe or with the engine,” Johnson said.
Investigators will also gather information related to the flight track data and collect maintenance records, evaluate the pilots' licenses, ratings and flight experience.
NTSB is also seeking more witness statements and videos from the minutes before impact. Anyone with information that could be relevant to the investigation is asked to contact the NTSB at witness@ntsb.gov.
“Those pieces of data, whether it’s video, sound, or whatever, are invaluable,” Johnson said.
“We have a lot of information that’s coming in. We’ve got lots of witnesses that have come forward, a lot of witnesses, as well as high-definition video, so I’m pretty confident that we’re going to document this wreckage. I’m hopeful that we can find out what happened here,” Johnson said.
Cessna Caravans are not required to have black boxes, or cockpit voice recorders, Johnson noted, however the team will be searching the wreckage for GPS and engine trend monitoring devices, which could shed light on what happened in the final moments before the crash — if they can be recovered at all.
“Some of those boxes are the size of a package of gum,” he said.
Investigators noted that the area near the airport is highly populated, with several buildings, fuel tanks, busy roadways and light rail.
“As horrible as this accident is, and we never want to lose sight of that, this could have been a lot worse,” Johnson said. “Once we start looking at the layout, the trajectory of the airplane, the trajectory of the wreckage, I agree 100% this could have been a lot worse.”
The NTSB preliminary report is expected to be completed in about a month, and the full report will likely take more than a year.
“It’s a lengthy process. We don’t want to rush the process,” said Stacia Joyce, investigator in charge. “We don’t want to be hasty about our decisions and about the investigation, because we want to be as thorough as we possibly can.
“We don’t want to make any mistakes, and we don’t want to exclude any possibilities,” Joyce said.
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