Omer Kulić, chief investigator of the Commission that investigated the accident of the aircraft of the Government of the Republic of Macedonia which took place on 26 February 2004 at the site Matića Brdo near the village Rotimlja, said that, according to their analysis, the main cause of the accident was pilot error.
Kulić, presenting the report, said that the crew was not properly trained to do the job entrusted to them. He said that the co-pilot was a former JNA officer, “he came from the army and never completed the training for this type of flying that will later prove to be a key reason for the accident.”
“According to our analysis, the main cause of accident is pilot errors, seven pilot errors, which the crew made from the moment of take-off from Skopje to the moment of crash just before Mostar,” Kulić said.
He said that the first mistake was that the crew should not have taken off from Skopje to Mostar because of bad weather situation in Mostar that morning.
“They did not know at all what the weather situation was in Mostar because they took off before 7 o’clock from Skopje and Mostar airport starts to send the first information about the weather situation only after 7 o’clock. Meaning that they were already airborne when the first weather report was sent out,” said Kulić.
The second mistake is that they did not conduct adequate preparation for approach and landing.
“The third mistake, when they contacted Mostar, the controller in Mostar reported that weather situation was such that the clouds were lower than they were allowed to go down in the course of approach to landing. The fourth error, when they lost the main landing signal they did not abort the approach and switched to an alternative airport as they had to do so,” Kulić said.
According to him, the fifth error was that they went on earlier to lower the plane to 2.7 miles.
“The sixth error was that they turned off the auto pilot and flew manually which turned out to be disastrous. The seventh mistake was that they did not maintain level flight when they reached the lowest point. Because of these errors, because of the lack of maintenance of level flight, rather than flying horizontally the plane oscillated and in that trajectory it hit the ground and disaster occurred,” explained Kulić.
(Source: fena)
