It is not yet clear what caused Sunday’s plane crash. The plane, said to be a Cessna 551 model, was on its way from Jerez in Spain to Cologne in Germany when something went wrong. Shortly after take-off, the pilot is said to have announced that he had suffered a pressure problem in the cabin.
– Then you have a situation where the pilot and passengers are affected by a kind of falling asleep effect. You lose judgment and it becomes difficult to know what you are doing, says Jan Olsson.
Small jets have a cruising altitude of around 10,000 meters – a possible solution to the problem could have been to go down to a lower altitude where the air is breathable, according to Olsson.
– The standard procedure should have been to dive until you reach an acceptable level, which would be around 2,000 meters. Here, the autopilot has been used at a relatively high altitude.
No requirement for a black box
Finding out exactly what happened can be difficult. Much depends on whether the aircraft can be salvaged or not, according to Jan Olsson. Jet aircraft of the current model are not required to carry a tachograph, or black box.
– There is probably no black box in this case.
A possible cause of the breakdown is that the cabin pressure was not restored after a repair or that an injury occurred at some point, he reasons.
– One can also think of more suspicious scenarios such as suicide or criminal acts against the plane. There are still some suspicions about it as long as you don’t know what happened.
Not Sweden that investigates
It has not yet been decided which country will have primary responsibility for the accident investigation. According to Peter Swaffer, head of department at the National Accident Commission, the plane did not disappear on Swedish territory.
– As it appears to us at the National Accident Commission right now, this is nothing for which we are given primary responsibility, even if we become involved or offer our support, he tells TT.