The Afghanistan Ministry of Transportation and Commercial Aviation will lead the investigation as part of the U.S.-led coalition's policy of making Afghanistan govern itself. But it won't be working alone. Four investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Afghanistan on May 2 with representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, which made the 747-400 cargo plane that went down. The doomed flight was scheduled to carry military vehicles and other cargo from Bagram Airbase to Dubai, a frequent stop for troops and equipment coming from and going to Afghanistan.
The first step will be to recover the flight and cockpit voice recorders and send them to the United States for analysis, one expert said. As in any crash, the flight recorders are expected to be invaluable. In the meantime, an unauthorized video possibly taken by a dashboard camera has gone viral after its posting on the LiveLeaks website. The video shows no evidence of Taliban fire, although the Associated Press and others have reported a Taliban claim of responsibility. Contractors working in Afghanistan are always concerned about insider attacks by rogue Afghans, but there is no evidence of that so far.
"It's a classic stall on takeoff," aviation safety expert Mary Schiavo says. "It goes up, loses its momentum, and falls off to the right."
Schiavo oversaw FAA responses to air crashes as inspector general at the Transportation Department in the 1990s. She said three things can cause a stall like the one seen on the video: first, a loss of engine power; second, runaway trim in which the small stabilizer tabs on a 747-400's tail elevators are incorrectly set upward, either because of a malfunction or human error; third, cargo sliding to the back of the plane on takeoff, upsetting its weight balance.
Investigators will try to determine whether the plane's fuel might have had water in it, which could have caused the engines to lose power, Schiavo said. They'll want to make sure the plane's takeoff speed was set to the correct velocity?if it goes too slowly, the plane would stall. In one example, investigators believe an incorrect takeoff setting caused the 2004 crash of a 747-244 jet in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And, of course, they'll explore whether the load was secured and balanced correctly. The flight's loadmaster, whose role was to secure and balance the cargo, was an employee of National, company spokeswoman Shirley Kaufman said in an email. (Orlando-based National Airlines is a subsidiary of National Air Cargo Holdings.)
The U.S.-led military coalition is checking the circumstances of the crash, too: "We are taking a comprehensive look at the events surrounding the aircraft crash, to include the subsequent photo on Twitter and the video posted on LiveLeaks," spokesman Erin O. Stattel said via email. Base security rules forbid photography without special permission so that insurgents can't easily learn a base's pattern of life.
NTSB referred inquiries to the Afghanistan ministry, which could not immediately be reached for comment.
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