PALERMO (Reuters) – A Tunisian pilot who paused to pray instead of taking emergency measures before crash-landing his plane, killing 16 people, has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court along with his co-pilot.
The 2005 crash at sea off Sicily left survivors swimming for their lives, some clinging to a piece of the fuselage that remained floating after the ATR turbo-prop aircraft splintered upon impact.
A fuel-gauge malfunction was partly to blame but prosecutors also said the pilot succumbed to panic, praying out loud instead of following emergency procedures and then opting to crash-land the plane instead trying to reach a nearby airport.
Another five employees of Tuninter, a subsidiary of Tunisair, were sentenced to between eight and nine years in jail by the court, in a verdict handed down Monday.
The seven accused, who were not in court, will not spend time in jail until the appeals process has been exhausted.
Originally posted 2009-03-25 08:40:56.
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9:14 am on March 25th, 2009
From the moment the fans stop turning, an aircraft is severely time-limited, you have precisely as much energy as you’ve managed to store as altitude (and a tad more as airspeed) and that’s it- and every second flying you’re caching that altitude in.
The PIC’s job is to fly the plane all the way to a stop, in such a way as to minimize damage to the passenger compartments and maximize survivability. Let the 40 folks in the back do the praying, that man’s job was to use every joule of energy he had left to prevent the loss of life that occurred.
Stopping to Pray, rather than planning a successful emergency descent to the field within gliding range, was nothing short of a dereliction of duty on the pilot’s part.