SouthShoreNow.ca

Flight 111 salvage work ends

Lisa Brown
Lighthouse staff

 ST. MARGARETS BAY - The recovery operation for wreckage from Swissair Flight 111 has ended.

 After more than a year of ongoing work, officials investigating the September 2, 1998, crash announced last week they have finished probing the waters of St. Margarets Bay.

 The final effort involved the Dutch ship Queen of the Netherlands, a vacuum-equipped dredger designed for deep-water excavation. She was contracted at a cost of $2 million.

 The vacuuming process started late September 27 and finished Wednesday night. The dredger then went to Sheet Harbour and was offloaded into a large containment dike by midnight Thursday. The material was left for the weekend so the water could drain out.

 This week, a team of Transportation Safety Board and RCMP investigators will oversee a crew hired to sift through the material for debris from the downed passenger jet.

 Much of the work will be done by hand. Machines with a series of screens will sift the material to cull the aircraft wreckage from the bottom material.

 "Since we've never done this sort of work before, we don't know exactly how long it's going to take to do the sorting and sifting," TSB spokesman Jim Harris said Friday. "But we figure somewhere between four and six weeks."

 About 8,500 cubic metres of material was removed from the ocean floor. The majority is gravel, rocks and silt, but Mr. Harris said a preliminary look at the early material seemed to show "a fair amount of pieces of the aircraft." That included exterior skin of the plane, pieces of structure and interior material, as well as wiring.

 "It looks as though we're going to get a fairly good supply of aircraft debris that we'll be able to then bring to Shearwater where it will be identified and put into the various areas that we're working on," he said.

 "It's too early to say for sure but there definitely is a good proportion of material of the aircraft in the debris."

 Officials are still looking for about 11,000 kilograms of the aircraft wreckage. As pieces of debris are sorted, they will be weighed so investigators can keep track of how much is recovered.

 Those probing the crash are most interested in the front nine metres of the aircraft. That section is being rebuilt in a hangar at Shearwater in an effort to determine the source of smoke the crew reported smelling in the cockpit 16 minutes before the crash.

 Investigators have determined there was widespread power failure and some fire aboard the aircraft before it plunged into the Atlantic. Bits of wiring and other debris from the front portion of the plane show signs of intense heat.

 About half of the cockpit remained missing prior to last week's dredging. Officials hope the latest recovery effort will yield more clues about the cause of the crash.

 It could be another year before that cause is determined.

 "We won't know for awhile how useful the material that we've recovered has been in the overall investigation," Mr. Harris said last week.

 Last week's dredging also included the possibility that more remains of Flight 111's 229 passengers and crew might be recovered. The water temperature at the bottom of St. Margarets Bay is about four degrees Celsius, cold enough to act as a preservative.

 The exclusion zone around the crash site remains in place. Investigators may still return to the area to scan the sea floor to be certain that all the plane's debris has been recovered.

 The area had been thoroughly assessed prior to the suction dredging so officials knew which areas needed further excavation. They now believe they have most of the material that is available, Mr. Harris said.