Barely five days after the Bristow Helicopters S-76 aircraft crashed into Lagos Lagoon at the Oworoshoki end, the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), on Sunday, impounded the conversation tape between the Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) at the Murtala Muhammed Airport (MMA) and the pilots.
Daily Independent gathered from a reliable source close to the rotary wing giant that the Chief Executive Officer of AIB, Dr. Felix Abali, had also confiscated the documents concerning the history of the aircraft.
The document, the source told Daily Independent, included maintenance, acquisition, and that of the two pilots involved in the crash from the regulatory body, the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), and Bristow Helicopters (Nigeria) Limited.
On the essence of AIB having these documents it in its custody, the source explained that it would help the air accident and incident investigation body to begin full investigation into the crash.
The ATC tape, Daily Independent further learnt, contains a selection of actual audio clips of conversations between ATC facilities and crew members of aircraft before an accident, and that the file sizes of each file in kilobytes are located next to the ‘Download’ link.
It was also learnt that some of the files are quite large and that they may require a long period of time to be completely downloaded and that with the downloading of the tape and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) also referred to as black boxes, the causal cause of the helicopter crash would be revealed.
Meanwhile, there were also indications that AIB would invite the affected parties in the crash to its head office at the international wing of the Murtala Muhammed (Airport), MMA, Lagos, today for interrogation to unravel the remote and immediate causes of the crash now that the black boxes had been recovered.
Checks by our correspondent revealed that the black boxes would be flown from its office in Lagos to the Abuja office, where its Flight Safety Laboratory is for downloading and analysis this week.
In the same vein, Bristow Helicopters has refused to say anything about the manifest of the ill- fated flight despite the controversy it had generated in the aviation industry.
Attempts made by Daily Independent to make both Bristow Helicopters and its media representatives to speak on the issue proved abortive.
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