Death crash plane 'in reverse'
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The tail of the plane remained intact after the crash.
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An Iranian airliner crashes in flames at Sharjah airport.
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- The propellers of an Iranian plane inexplicably went into reverse minutes before it crashed last month, killing 46 people, the civil aviation authorities in the United Arab Emirates said Tuesday.
"Instead of the propellers going forward, they were going in reverse, which is an abnormal situation in flight," Mohammed Ghanem al-Ghaith, the director of the General Civil Aviation Authority told reporters.
"We cannot tell whether it was a human or technical factor," he said of the malfunction. He said a pilot of a turboprop Fokker-50 would put the propellers into reverse while the plane is taxi-ing on the ground, but never in flight.
The Kish Air plane crashed in an open area about two miles from Sharjah airport on February 10, killing 46 people of the 49 passengers and crew onboard. The plane was flying to Sharjah from the Iranian island of Kish in the Gulf.
The three survivors -- an Iranian, Egyptian and a Filipino -- remain in hospital.
Al-Ghaith said the preliminary examination of the plane's cockpit voice recorder revealed "normal conversation." He repeated earlier reports that the pilots did not send out an emergency call.
In a statement Tuesday, the General Civil Aviation Authority said the plane "appears to have operated normally until about two-and-a-half miles (three kilometers) from the end of runway 12 at Sharjah International Airport."
The plane suddenly embarked on a nose dive and turned left before crashing, the statement said.
Al-Ghaith said the investigation was continuing.
The plane was 11 years old. Kish Air bought it in 2002.
Kish Air officials in Iran, where Tuesday was a national holiday, did not answer their office or mobile phones.
Copyright 2004 The
Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
