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Garuda Indonesia Flight 152

Coordinates: 03°15′53″N 098°40′48″E / 3.26472°N 98.68000°E / 3.26472; 98.68000
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Garuda Indonesia Flight 152
A Garuda Indonesia Airbus A300 similar to the accident aircraft
Accident
DateSeptember 26, 1997
SummaryControlled flight into terrain
SiteNear Pancur Batu, Deli Serdang, North Sumatra, Indonesia
03°15′53″N 098°40′48″E / 3.26472°N 98.68000°E / 3.26472; 98.68000
Aircraft
Aircraft typeAirbus A300B4-220
OperatorGaruda Indonesia
RegistrationPK-GAI
Flight originSoekarno-Hatta Int'l Airport, Jakarta, Indonesia
DestinationPolonia International Airport, Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia
Passengers222
Crew12
Fatalities234 (all)
Survivors0

Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 was a scheduled domestic Indonesian passenger flight from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta to Polonia International Airport in Medan, North Sumatra, flown using an Airbus A300B4 registered PK-GAI and operated by state owned flag carrier Garuda Indonesia

On Friday, September 26, 1997, Flight 152 piloted by Hance Rahmowiyogo, 42, a pilot with over 20 years of flying experience at Garuda Indonesia and more than 12,000 flying hours, crashed into mountainous woodlands 30 miles (48 km) from Medan during low visibility caused by the 1997 Southeast Asian haze. All 234 passengers and crew were killed in the disaster. The crash site was in a ravine near the village of Buah Nabar in the Sibolangit district south of Medan.[1]

To date, Garuda Indonesia Flight 152 remains the deadliest single-plane crash in Indonesian history, and the deadliest aviation accident in 1997. The death toll was and remains the fourth-highest of any aviation accident involving an Airbus A300, after China Airlines Flight 140, American Airlines Flight 587, and Iran Air Flight 655.

Incident

Flight GA152 was cleared for an ILS approach to Medan runway 05 and was flying on a 316 degree heading on Airway 585/W12. Having descended to 3000 feet, the crew were instructed to turn left heading 240 degrees for vectoring to intercept the runway 05 ILS. Exactly 2 minutes before impact the flight was instructed to continue on a 215 degree heading and descend to 2000 feet. This is 500 feet below the initial-approach altitude for the VHF navigation-beacon published let-down procedure, which keeps the aircraft much further from the hills. At 13.30h ATC directed the flight to turn right heading 045 and report when establishing the localizer. Confusion at the part of the air traffic controller followed over whether GA152 was turning left or right. Just 10 seconds after confirming the right turn, the Airbus crashed in a wooded area, broke up and burst into flames.

According to surveyors at the site, the aircraft hit left-wing-low on a heading of about 220 degrees in a ravine. This tends to confirm that the pilot of Garuda flight GA152, having acknowledged an ATC instruction to turn right to intercept the instrument-landing system (ILS), had scarcely deviated from his previously cleared heading of 215. The crash site is about 1,150 ft above sea level.[2]

About four minutes before the crash, there was some confusion by Medan ATC because two planes had the same flight number. Merpati Flight 152, which had the same flight number as Garuda Flight 152, was also on approach at that time. A transcript of the radio communications between the aircraft and Medan ATC shows confusion by the air traffic controller at Medan over which 152 is being spoken to. Then, after Garuda 152 was in radar range, air traffic control pulled it off what Garuda Indonesia pilots say is the normal landing approach, and told it to turn left at 2,000 feet, about 14 miles away. The directions brought the plane to a mountainous area requiring an altitude of at least 7,500 feet, the pilots say. Normally, the plane would descend to 2,000 feet at 6.6 miles. According to the transcript, the pilot asked for confirmation of the instructions and was told to go on.[3]

Passengers

The passengers were mostly Indonesian, but included two British, one Belgian, six Malaysian, four Germans, and two Americans and two Quebec Canadians.[4]

Nationalities of the passengers and crew

Nationality Passengers Crew Total
 Indonesia 205 12 217
 Canada 2 0 2
 United Kingdom 2 0 2
 France 1 0 1
 Malaysia 6 0 6
 Germany 4 0 4
 United States 2 0 2
Total 222 12 234

Notable passengers

Yanto Tanoto, the president director of pulp and rayon company PT Inti Indorayon Utama Polar.[5]

Passenger remains

48 of the bodies recovered from the crash were too mutilated to be identified and were buried in a mass grave in a cemetery outside Medan's Polonia Airport, where 57 victims of a 1979 Garuda Fokker F28 crash were also buried. The remaining 186 bodies were identified and returned to their families for private burial.[6]

Investigation

The cause of the crash, according to the official report of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), were:

  1. The aircraft turned left instead of right as instructed by the ATC at 06:30:04.
  2. The aircraft descended below the assigned altitude of 2,000 feet (610 m) and thereafter struck treetops at 1,550 feet (472 m) above mean sea level.[7]

Transcript of final communication

The following transcript is an unofficial extract of the air traffic control (ATC) communications as appeared in the press.[8]

  • MNA 241 = Merpati Flight 241 (approaching)
  • BOU 683 = Bouraq Flight 683 (departing)
  • GIA 152 = Garuda Flight 152 (approaching)
  • MEDAN = MEDAN ATC

Exchange between MEDAN and GIA 152 are in bold.

Lawsuits

The first lawsuit was filed by Nolan Law Group in Chicago on September 24, 1998 on behalf of American passengers, Fritz and Djoeminah Baden. https://w3.courtlink.lexisnexis.com/cookcounty/Finddock.asp?DocketKey=BJJI0L0ABBBFH0LD Additional lawsuits were filed in each state and federal courts in Chicago related to many more victims from Indonesia, Germany, England, Italy, and Australia. The sole defendant in the lawsuits was Sundstrand Corporation (later Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation), the company that designed and manufactured the Mark-II ground proximity warning system ("GPWS") installed on the Airbus 300. The plaintiffs alleged that the GPWS was defectively designed, that the manufacturer was aware of its deficiencies in mountainous terrain for over a decade, and had the system worked as designed the accident could have been avoided.

The Indonesian authorities never released the results of their investigation of the crash, forcing the lawyers of the crash victims to file actions in the United Kingdom and France in order to obtain the flight record data from Flight 152's black boxes. The Flight Data Recorder revealed that the warning from the ground-proximity warning system sounded only 5 seconds before the airplane made contact with the treetops. Since the pilots immediately pulled the jet into a climb once the alarm sounded and just barely clipped the treetops, had the alarm met international design standards and sounded between 18 and 23 seconds before impact, the accident would have been avoided.

The victim's laywers produced several internal memos from Hamilton-Sundstrand showing that the system had been inadequately tested for mountainous terrain, having been mostly tested on flat ground with gentle slopes. Perhaps the most critical memo was one written by Hamilton-Sundstrand engineer Donald Bateman, who wrote: "Based on recent flight demonstrations ... of the MK II GPWS, I have become very concerned about the Excessive Rate Detector Circuits in the MK II computers. I believe we have a much more potentially serious problem than was first envisioned in 1982. GPWS warnings can be short or non-existent in some circumstances." Bateman's memo went on to say that "the warning time for flight into mountainous terrain and steep descent rates from altitudes above the range of the radio altimeter can be very short and erratic at times ... From our studies, the average escape margin is only three-and-one-half seconds for the typical mountainous-terrain accident scenario." Sundstrand's in-house experts conducted their own after-crash simulations and confirmed that a properly functioning warning system should have sounded alarms about 14 seconds before impact and that the accident would have been avoided if that had occurred.

Nearly six years after the crash the lawsuit was settled out of court.[9]

Coyle v. P.T. Garuda Indonesia, 01-35784;[10]

Joyce Coyle filed a suit against the Indonesian government subsidiary that operates Garuda Indonesia Airlines.

Coyle alleged in her complaint that Garuda was liable for wrongful death under the Warsaw Convention. She also claimed that Garuda, which is wholly owned by the Indonesian government, could be held liable under two exceptions to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. She contended that because Garuda was authorized to operate in the United States at the time, the immunity had been explicitly waived under the rules of the Department of Transportation, which requires foreign air carriers to open themselves to suit in the United States as a condition of being allowed to fly to, from, or within this country. The waiver is limited to actions arising under treaties. Coyle also claimed that by selling tickets in the United States, Garuda waived immunity under the “commercial activity” exception to the FSIA.

U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones of the District of Oregon denied Garuda’s motion to dismiss, adopting a magistrate judge’s conclusion that the trip to Medan was “one leg of an international journey” and thus subject to the Warsaw Convention and the explicit waiver of immunity.

Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain, writing for the Ninth Circuit, rejected Garuda’s claim that a flight between two points in the same country will always fall outside the scope of the waiver. But he agreed with the defendant that under the circumstances, the Badens’ trip to Medan did not constitute ”international air transportation” within the meaning of the Warsaw Convention. The facts that the tickets did not reference any international travel, were purchased in Indonesia from a source independent of the travel agent who sold them the U.S.-Indonesia tickets, and were labeled “DOMESTIK” unambiguously established that the flight was not part of their international journey as contemplated by the treaty, O’Scannlain said.

The judge explained: “[T]he crux of this litigation is whether Flight 152 was a part of [the] larger international trip for purposes of the Warsaw Convention...whether it was a component of ‘one undivided transportation...regarded by the parties as a single operation’...or just a late-added, purely domestic side trip apart from their international itinerary with its own final destination. The Badens’ tickets for Flight 152 are powerful, unambiguous evidence of the latter.”

Nor was the judge persuaded by the “commercial activity” argument. For the exception to apply, O’Scannlain noted, the statute requires that the action arise from “a commercial activity carried on in the United States by the foreign state...or upon an act outside the territory of the United States in connection with a commercial activity of the foreign state elsewhere [when such] act causes a direct effect in the United States.” The fact that Garuda sold tickets in the United States did not furnish a sufficient nexus to subject its domestic flights to the exception, the judge wrote. Senior Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez and Judge Raymond C. Fisher concurred in the opinion.

Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that government-owned foreign airline cannot be held liable in a U.S. court for the deaths of passengers on a domestic flight, even if they were visiting the country as part of an international journey.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "Accident Photo: Garuda Indonesia 152 - Airbus A300 PK-GAI". AirDisaster.Com. September 26, 1997. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  2. ^ "Low clearance is key to Garuda crash - 10/8/1997". Flight Global. October 8, 1997. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  3. ^ "Unidentified dead from Indonesia plane crash buried - Sept. 29, 1997". CNN. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  4. ^ "Indonesia: Investigators Look At Possible Effect Of Smog On Garuda Airlines Airbus Crash". Itnsource.com. September 27, 1997. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  5. ^ "WORLD - Indonesian plane crashes in smog area, 234 die". Hurriyetdailynews.com. September 27, 1997. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  6. ^ "Unidentified dead from Indonesia plane crash buried - Sept. 29, 1997". CNN. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  7. ^ "CVR Database". Tailstrike.com. September 26, 1997. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  8. ^ "Aviation Safety Network > Accident investigation > CVR / FDR > Transcripts > ATC transcript Garuda Flight 152 - 26 SEP 1997". Aviation-safety.net. October 16, 2004. Retrieved January 13, 2014.
  9. ^ Sep 25, 2003 (September 25, 2003). "Asia Times". Atimes.com. Retrieved January 13, 2014.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  10. ^ "Ninth Circuit: Indonesian Carrier Immune in Sumatran Air Crash". Metnews.com. April 13, 2004. Retrieved January 13, 2014.

External links

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