Tanzanian officials stated Thursday that the pilots of a Precise Air jet that fell into Lake Victoria last November ignored automatic “pull-up” alarms.
On November 6, last year, the jet crashed into Africa’s largest lake, killing 19 passengers, with police blaming terrible weather for Tanzania’s worst aviation tragedy in decades.
When resentment flared over the government’s handling of the rescue effort, President Samia Suluhu Hassan vowed a formal probe into the catastrophe.
The transport ministry stated Thursday in the second preliminary assessment released since the crash that an enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS) gave three alarms “about the extremely fast descent rate.”
“The warning was not followed by corrective action of the flight crew,” the ministry’s aircraft accident and incident investigation branch said.
“Instead, the flight crew pushed the control column into a nose-down position.”
The EGPWS alerts the cockpit if a plane is in danger of flying into the ground or hitting something.
The report said the pilots were flying in bad weather and in conditions marked by poor visibility, which “may have contributed to the failure to react to terrain warnings during the final approach.”
“This type of weather is common around the Bukoba airport and is well known to pilots,” it said, adding that the aircraft circled for about 20 minutes before its descent.
An earlier report published by the ministry soon after the accident said the rescue effort was too slow, and that more passengers would likely have survived had emergency workers been better prepared and equipped to carry out their duties.
Fishermen, who were the first to arrive on the scene, used canoes to pluck people to safety after a crew member unlocked a rear door, allowing survivors to get out.
But most of the victims were in the submerged front of the plane, while the two pilots were unable to escape the cockpit.
Investigators said the cause of the crash was still being probed.
Precision Air, which is partly owned by Kenya Airways, said 39 passengers and four crew members were on board flight PW 494 from the financial capital Dar es Salaam to the northwestern city of Bukoba.
