The flight was short-lived. When the Boeing 737 of the Transair air freight company took off from Honolulu International Airport on Oahu at around 1:33 a.m. on July 2, the pilots noticed an engine failure in the middle of the climb at an altitude of only 640 meters, which they reported to the tower.
Actually, the destination of their short flight was Kahului Airport on the Hawaiian island of Maui. But at 1.46 a.m. the second engine of the 45-year-old Boeing 737-200 stopped working. “We’d like to go to the next runway, please,” was the radio message from the two crew members in the cockpit.
They lost more and more altitude, reaching the airport of departure or the even closer Kalaeloa Airport was out of the question. The pilots had to initiate an emergency landing in the dark night. So the machine hit just three kilometers from the coast in Mamala Bay off Honolulu.
The crew can be saved
On impact, the plane broke into several pieces. The crew got out through the cockpit window – into the water. One of the pilots clung to the still floating stern. In an immediate rescue operation, one pilot was rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter and the other by an Aircraft Rescue and Firefighting boat. Both were flown to a hospital with injuries, some of them serious, and survived.
A week later, underwater cameras sighted the large wreckage at a depth of up to 140 meters. The salvage operation began in October to retrieve the fuselage parts and containers and above all the engines for the accident investigation from the Pacific Ocean.
With the emergence of the rear section, the salvage work is now complete. On November 2, the National Transportation Safety Board, the US traffic authority, reported that the two flight recorders, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, had also been recovered.
The subsequent investigations into the cause of the accident will take one to two years.
Those: www.ntsb.gov
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