Swiss air traffic controllers said today their automatic collision warning system had been switched off for maintenance when two jets slammed into each other over Germany, killing 71 people.
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German firefighters inspect the
site of a crashed Boeing 757 cargo near Owingen in southwestern Germany. Photograph: Reuters/Vincent Kessler. |
The disclosure, and an admission that they gave the pilot of the Russian jet just 50 seconds to take avoiding action before the disaster, focused attention on the role of the controllers, whom Russian airline officials have blamed for the crash.
But Swiss air traffic control authorities said they had violated no rules in the minutes before the Russian Tupolev airliner collided with a DHL cargo plane over southern Germany, killing 52 Russian children and 19 others late on Monday night.
Recovery teams found the flight data and voice recorders of both planes and sent them to the German accident investigation office at Braunschweig, where experts will begin deciphering possibly vital clues about the cause of the catastrophe.
At the crash site along Lake Constance on the German-Swiss border, rescue workers said they would soon complete the grim task of searching for corpses and clues among the wreckage. Police said 38 bodies had so far been recovered.
German officials said that because of lack of hospital space they would store bodies for now in a network of naturally cooled underground tunnels built for armaments firms in World War Two by slave labourers from the Nazis' Dachau concentration camp.
In Russia, distraught relatives of the dead rushed through final preparations to visit the scene. Officials said about 140 people would make a brief journey tomorrow to help authorities identify bodies, then return home in the evening.
A group of Russian crash investigators were at the main Tupolev crash site near the picturesque lake as a large yellow crane gingerly lifted part of the plane's fuselage to get at bodies still trapped inside.
Many of the victims were still strapped into their seats.
"It is now our most important task to recover the bodies," Mr Thomas Schaeuble, the interior minister of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, told a news conference. "We hope to be able to complete the recovery of bodies tomorrow."
So far only the only victims identified are the two pilots of the Boeing 757 cargo jet which collided with the Tupolev 154 belonging to Bashkirian Airlines, based at Ufa in the Urals.
Local German state prosecutors contacted Swiss air traffic control which oversees the airspace where Monday's collision happened, Mr Schaeuble said, but he declined to elaborate.
Mr Roger Gaberelle, a spokesman for the Swiss air traffic control agency Skyguide, said an automatic "short-term conflict alert system" at Zurich airport, which warns of impending collisions, had been shut down for routine maintenance. "That is always being done at night, because that is when there is the least traffic," Mr Gaberelle said. Controllers said there were just five planes in the sector at the time.
The two doomed aircraft were headed for each other at the same altitude, then went into nearly synchronised dives to avoid a collision and slammed into each other.
The Swiss controllers initially said the Russian pilot responded late to warnings to reduce altitude. But after saying yesterday he was given a "good minute" to do so, they said today it was 50 seconds, calling this tight but adequate.
The pilot responded 25 seconds later, German officials say. Bashkirian Airlines denied the Tupolev crew had made any mistakes. "It is the opinion of our company that the air traffic control was at fault," said Mr Nikolai Odegov, the airline's director, in Germany as part of the Russian investigation team.
He later said he had faith in the investigation process. The Swiss also said one of the two controllers on duty at the time was taking a break. Skyguide Chief Executive Mr Alain Rossier told reporters this was "completely valid (according) to our rules, especially during the night when traffic is low". It was, however, normal practice to have two controllers on watch when the collision alert system was not operating.