After the shock the search for answers

In the aftermath of the plane crash near Glasgow airport which killed eight people on Friday, TORCUIL CRICHTON, PENNIE TAYLOR and DAVID WRAGG ask what could have caused the tragedy As the families of the crew and passengers grieve today, air accident investigators begin the meticulous task of determining why G-ILGW fell out of the sky on take-off from Glasgow Airport on Friday, killing eight people and leaving three others seriously injured.

The list of the dead disclosed so far is a grim litany. Pauline MacIver, four months pregnant; Colin Finnie, a 34-year-old father-of- two; Pauline Moyes a stewardess and mother-of-three; Linda Taylor, married only four weeks ago; John Easson, the pilot and founder of the charter company and his co-pilot Bill Henderson. Yesterday their relatives met, possibly for the first time, to pray and mourn in the chapel at Glasgow Airport.

The Air Accident Investigation Board already has six inspectors sifting through the debris of the Cessna 404 Titan. Representatives from the aircraft's manufacturer, Cessna, and the engine makers, Continental, have also joined in the investigation.

An RAF recovery team is on standby to lift the wreckage to Farnborough, possibly this evening. The investigation will focus on the airworthiness of the aircraft and its service record. As a matter of routine, investigators will be checking the aircraft's maintenance records and the maintenance records for its engines - including its turbochargers.

The remains of the airframe - broken in three by the impact of the crash in a field in Paisley - will be closely examined, along with the engines and propellors . If one of the engines did fail, as eyewitnesses say, investigators will want to see if they can tell from the wreckage how the aircraft's control surfaces - such as the rudder, ailerons and elevators - were adjusted to compensate for the loss of power on one side of the aircraft which forced it to drop out of the sky.

All those on board G-ILGW would have known there was something seriously wrong the moment the emergency request was made to return to Glasgow Airport. The compact aircraft was just three miles and a few minutes away from the runway.

All nine passengers were flight crew en route to Aberdeen to join a charter flight to Majorca. All were seasoned air travellers - they would have heard and seen and understood exactly what was happening. Strapped to their seats in the cramped cabin, they would have looked on as the pilot of the small plane struggled to regain control of the stricken aircraft.

Faced with a catastrophic engine failure on take-off, pilots are trained to cope - but there are only seconds and the finest margins of handling between death and a safe return to the airfield. John Easson, the founder of the Edinburgh Air Charter company which operated the flight, and his co-pilot Bill Henderson were both experienced pilots. They would have rehearsed the engine shut down scenario every six months in accordance with regulations. Easson, a Cessna instructor, would have taken other pilots through the procedure, closing down the throttle on one engine and compensating for the loss of power with quick adjustments, frequently.

If an engine closes down or goes on fire the pilot must immediately trim the aircraft, feathering the propellors in the wind, retracting the undercarriage and adjusting the flaps up. There are seconds to carry out these delicate manoeuvres to bring the aircraft under control. Bad enough if it happens at high altitude, but almost impossible only 500 feet off the ground just after take-off, when the engines should be delivering full power. "Everything would have been against him," said an experienced twin-engine pilot.

In such a situation an aircraft will immediately yaw towards the dead engine unless the pilot somehow reaches a safe engine speed on a single engine. If that is not achieved, the plane will tip over and the temptation is to pull the nose down to compensate. But if a pilot reaches that stage, the chances are the plane is going down anyway. Attempting to turn the Cessna back to the runway, it appears the aircraft stalled - that it simply stopped flying through the air and dropped out of the sky.

On the ground there were also barely seconds to react. Eyewitnesses heard the engine splutter and saw the right wing drop. They knew instantly that it would crash. The plane swooped right, hit a hedge and exploded into flames. Airport fire crews, already on alert, raced to the scene - but by then the highly combustible fuel had engulfed the small plane.

John Connell, the tractor driver who raced across the farm field to the scene, reacted instinctively. He dragged clear one of the survivors who had crawled out of the blazing wreckage and twice risked the flames to drag another two clear, ripping one of them out still strapped to his seat. Already scorched and beaten back by the intensity of the heat, he could do nothing more. "There were explosions everywhere," he said. "There was a lady screaming inside. There was screaming all around me."

The American Federal Aviation Agency already demands strict inspection of all Cessna aircraft, but a proposed directive from the FAA now urges operators to check the exhaust system on the engines in much shorter flying cycles. In the 20 or so years since the original airworthiness directive was issued, failures of exhaust systems on Cessna aircraft have continued to occur - and have contributed to fatalities, according to the FAA.

No details of the flying or maintenance history of the Cessna which crashed in Glasgow were available yesterday from the lease operators, Edinburgh Air Charter, or the owners, Fraggle Leasing, based in the Isle of Man.

Although the aircraft is reputed to be almost 20 years old, age is not a problem provided all maintenance procedures have been followed. Aircraft of this type often have relatively low annual flying hours - typically 500 or 600 hours per year, compared to upwards of 3500 hours for a commercial jet airliner. Meanwhile, there will also be a detailed autopsy of the bodies, which have been difficult to identify accurately. This gruesome task is important not only to establish the exact cause of death, but also to see whether any lessons can be learned for future use in aircraft design.

The aircraft is unlikely to have had either a flight data recorder, the so-called 'black box', or a cockpit voice recorder. Nevertheless, the air traffic control tapes will have been secured and communication between the aircraft's captain and the controllers analysed for any clues to the cause of the accident.

Eyewitness accounts state that one of the propellors was not working, suggesting either a fault with the propeller itself or more probably a fault with the engine - which could include its turbocharger. Probably because of the engine fault, the aircraft was flying relatively low, at around 500 feet. It may also have been flying relatively slowly, so that when it started to turn it stalled as it lost speed, because of the increased drag generated by the ailerons and rudder as it banked into the turn. Aircraft stall once their speed drops below that which is necessary to keep them in the air.

Fire often accompanies many aircraft accidents, as broken fuel pipes leave fuel squirting over the hot metal of the engine and exhaust systems. In this case, the aircraft was piston-engined, using a fuel known as AVGAS, which is explosive and burns more readily than the AVTUR or Jet B used by jet and turboprop aircraft.

It is impossible to say definitely that the death toll would have been lower had this been a turboprop aircraft, but it is a possibility. It is also certain that the survivors owe much to the tremendous courage of John Connell, the farm worker who helped all three of them.

Overall, the Cessna 404 has a commendable safety record - but this has not been a good week for Cessna as a company. On the same day the Edinburgh Air Charters Cessna crashed, the remains of 10 Americans and two Tanzanians were recovered from an identical aircraft which two days earlier had crashed into a mountain in central Africa. The accident in Tanzania can be discounted as no more than an unhappy coincidence, but Cessna is deeply worried by the Glasgow accident.

"Generally we hear about accidents when the investigating agency invites us to be part of the investigation, but in this case we already knew," said Jennifer Whitlow, media officer with the Cessna Aircraft Company in Kansas. "We have produced and delivered more than 180,000 aircraft over the past 72 years. There are lots of Cessna 404s in circulation, but it is very unusual for two planes of the same type to crash in the same week."

The manufacturer is better known for its range of single engine high-winged light aircraft, used by many flying schools, and for its range of executive jets. While always aiming at the budget market, the aircraft have been reliable workhorses, and generally easy to fly. Cessna, and many other American-based light aircraft manufacturers, stopped building aircraft for the private flier in the 1980s as overzealous product liability legislation made it impossible for the manufacturers to obtain insurance for their products - but the rules have now been relaxed and the smaller aircraft are back in production.

The Cessna 404 which crashed on Friday is not in this category. While still officially a light aircraft, it is intended for the professional pilot, and for use on just the sort of service which it was providing for Airtours - the inclusive tour charter airline owned by the package holiday company of the same name.

The Cessna is used as a shuttle service for businesspeople, light freight and cabin crews. The flight to Aberdeen is a twice-weekly routine for the Airtours crew based at Glasgow Airport - albeit a noisier experience than they are used to. "You spend the whole journey just listening to the engines," said one of the cabin crew who regularly makes the trip.

On Friday's flight the pitch of the Cessna engines would have changed suddenly, signalling the beginning of a disastrous chain of events. The chances of getting out of a situation like an engine shutdown are marginal. The Cessna 404's ability to fly on one engine is not assured, but it will take up to a year before the investigators establish why a routine flight ended in disaster.

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