New details about the plane crash at Faro Airport that killed 56 people and injured 106 in 1992 have emerged with the aircraft’s supervising technician claiming the Dutch Martinair Boeing 707 “never should have left Amsterdam Airport”.
The revelation came in a report by Dutch news channel EenVandaag, which added strength to the belief that the crash resulted from a series of pilot and crew errors after Martinair ignored its own regulations.
The technician claims he was “pressured” into signing a form that postponed the replacement of important landing gear for the third time when it should have been delayed no more than twice.
Says the technician, Martinair thought more about “profits than safety”.
He also suggested the plane approached Faro Airport “at a wrong angle” and that landing should have been cancelled.
Though the official cause of the crash has always been “extreme weather conditions such as wind shear”, the TV report suggests that experts who claim otherwise have been “silenced”.
In fact, relatives and friends of those killed in the disaster maintain vital information has been withheld as to the causes of the tragedy.
EenVandaag’s report reiterated that parts of the investigation have been “classified until 2073”.
Meantime, an operational security technician at Faro Airport is in the final stages of writing a book in which he says he intends to tell “the whole story”.
Pedro Fernandes has spoken with 24 people, including survivors, air traffic controllers and members of the investigative authorities.
“With each person, I opened a Pandora box,” he has told Barlavento newspaper.
Some survivors even reported supernatural sightings before the accident.
A female passenger told Fernandes that she saw an “angel” and “halos over people’s heads”, and that she had a feeling she had to unfasten the buckle on her and her daughter’s seatbelts.
This ended up saving their lives, as they were projected to the back of the aircraft and avoided death, unlike all the others seated in the plane’s central area.
Fernandes has not yet found a publisher for his book, but he says he will publish it on his own if he has to.
He also wants the book’s profits to go towards creating a psychological support centre for workers of Portugal’s airport authority ANA.
https://eenvandaag.atavist.com/crash-faro
[email protected]
Photo: Francisco Gomes
