South African Airways Flight 295

Investigation

Rennie Van Zyl, South Africa's head crash investigator, examined three wristwatches from baggage recovered from the surface; two of the watches were still running according to Taiwan time. Van Zyl deduced the approximate time of impact at 00:07:00, around three minutes after the last communication with air traffic control.

Immediately after the crash, the press and public opinion suspected that terrorism brought down Flight 295. South Africa, then under the control of the apartheid government, was the target of terrorism both domestically and internationally. Offices for SAA, the country's flag carrier, had previously been attacked and targeted by anti-apartheid protests. A month before the crash an angry crowd had ransacked the office of South African Airways in Harare. Experts searched for indicators of an explosion on the initial pieces of wreckage discovered, such as surface pitting, impact cavities and spatter cavities caused by white-hot fragments from explosive devices that strike and melt metal alloys found in aircraft structures. Experts found none of this evidence. The investigators drew blood samples from two of the recovered bodies and found that the bodies had soot in their tracheae, indicating that at least two had died from smoke inhalation before the aircraft had crashed, and concluded that some of the passengers would have already lost their lives even if the pilots had successfully reached the airport.

South Africa mounted an underwater search, named 'Operation Resolve', to try to locate the wreckage. The underwater locator beacons (ULBs) attached to the flight recorders were not designed for deep ocean use; nevertheless, a two-month-long sonar search for them was carried out before the effort was abandoned on 8 January 1988 when the ULBs were known to have stopped transmitting (at the time a ULB had to generate sonic pulses for thirty days). Steadfast Oceaneering, a specialist deep-ocean recovery company in the US, was contracted at great expense to find the site and recover the flight recorders. The search area is described as being comparable in size to that of the wreck of the Titanic, with the water at 16000 ft being considerably deeper than any previously successful salvage operation. The wreckage was found on 28 January, within two days of Steadfast Oceaneering commencing its search.

Three debris fields were found:, and. These locations were spread 1.5 km, 2.3 km and 2.5 km apart, indicating that the aircraft broke apart in mid-air (it was suggested that the tail separated first). On 6 January 1989, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was salvaged successfully from a record depth of 16,100 ft by the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) Gemini, but the flight data recorder was never found.

Van Zyl took the voice recorder to the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in Washington, DC, both to show his goodwill and to ensure neutral observers. Van Zyl believes that if he had kept the CVR in South Africa he could have been accused of covering up the truth. At the NTSB, Van Zyl felt frustration that the degraded (but still functional) CVR, which had been in the deep ocean for fourteen months, did not initially yield any useful information. Around twenty-eight minutes into the recording the CVR indicated that the fire alarm sounded. Fourteen seconds after the fire alarm, the circuit breakers began to pop. Investigators believe that around eighty circuit breakers failed. The CVR cable failed eighty-one seconds after the alarm. The recording revealed the extent of the fire.

Van Zyl discovered that the front-right pallet located in the main deck's cargo hold was the origin of the fire. The flight manifest said that pallet mostly comprised computers in polystyrene packaging. The investigators said that the localised fire likely came in contact with the packaging and produced gases that accumulated near the ceiling. They also said that gases ignited into a flash fire that affected the entire cargo hold. The fire did not burn lower than one metre above the cargo floor. The walls and ceiling of the cargo hold received severe fire damage. Van Zyl ended his investigation without discovering why the fire started.

The official report noted the presence of the computer equipment, and suggested that a possible cause could have been the batteries contained in the computers exploding or spontaneously combusting, although this was not given as a conclusive cause of the fire.