Atlantic Airways Flight 670

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**Atlantic Airways Flight 670**
Summary
Date	October 10, 2006
Type	Slid off runway during landing
Site	Stord
Fatalities	4
Injuries	12
Aircraft
Aircraft type	British Aerospace 146-200A
Operator	Atlantic Airways
Tail number	OY-CRG
Passengers	12
Crew	4
Survivors	12

Atlantic Airways Flight 670 ^[1] was a chartered flight between Stavanger Airport, Sola and Molde Airport, Årø with an intermediate landing at Stord Airport, Sørstokken. At 07:35, on October 10, 2006, the aircraft, a British Aerospace 146-200, slid off the runway and burst into flames while landing at Stord in Norway.

The aircraft had 16 people on board, 12 passengers and a crew of 4. Atlantic Airways chief Magni Arge said that eleven of the passengers were Norwegian and one foreigner. Three of the crew members were Faroese, and one was a Dane.^[2] News reports first indicated that 13 people had been rescued.^[3] Later it emerged that only 12 people, among them the pilots, had been rescued from the fire and that four died - three Norwegian passengers^[4] and one Faroese stewardess^[5]. The aircraft was one of several carrying construction workers for Aker Kværner Stord to construction at Aukra related to the Ormen Lange field.^[6]

The pilot of another Atlantic Airways flight which landed 20 minutes earlier did not report any unusual landing conditions at the airport though the runway was wet from rain.^[7] On September 2, about a month prior to this accident, an Atlantic Airways flight was forced to make an emergency landing at Bergen Airport, Flesland due to failure to extend the flaps.^[8] Although the flaps can be considered a part of the braking system, it is mainly used in air, to increase lift to enable a lower flight and landing speed. The flaps failure in September was detected before the scheduled landing at Vágar Airport as a part of the in-flight checks and the plane redirected to Bergen because its airport had longer runways, which was needed for the higher landing speed. The same plane as on September 2 made a second emergency landing in 3 days later in Bergen with the same problem. This plane was not the same as the accident plane in Stord. The failure to extend the flaps is a known problem of BAe-146 and it is avoided by adjusting the flaps mechanism precisely every two years and lubricating it for every 10th flight. Apparently Atlantic Airways had problems with these adjustments in September.

The condition of the airport's fire station and control tower have also been criticized, and there was in fact a newspaper article, written hours before the crash, reporting that funding to upgrade the facilities had been denied. ^[9]

The black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, both sustained serious heat damage in the fire, and it was feared they were so damaged that no data could be extracted from them. However, much of the data was still retrievable. ^[10]^[11]

According to the Faroese newspaper Dimmalætting, the aircraft was 20 years old, and was the first one purchased by Atlantic Airways in 1988. Early in the 1990s the same plane slid off the runway at Vágar Airport, but nobody was injured. The runway at Vágar is only 1.400 m long; in Stord, it is only 1.200 m^[12]. The reason for the 1990s accident was that the pilot landed too far in on the runway due to bad weather conditions.

At the international football match on October 11 between France and the Faroes, a minute's silence was held in memory of the dead. ^[13]

On 17 January 2007, the readers of the Faroese newspaper Dimmalætting voted the two stewardesses, Maibritt Magnussen and Guðrun Joensen †, to the Faroese persons of the year (ársins føroyingar). ^[14]

[edit] Official Investigation

Initial findings of October 10, 2006, shows that the spoilers failed to engage. Evidence from pilots and technical findings shows that the spoilers failed to reduce lift and thus reduced braking capacity. The reason for the spoiler failure was probably a hard landing. The plane did not have ground contact when the captain tried to release the flaps. Water on runway also reduced braking capacity. Airbrakes seems to have enganged properly.^[15]

The voice and flight data recorders contain information that confirms statements given by the pilot and eyewitnesses, that the spoilers failed to engage on touch-down at the short runway in Stord, Norway. Norwegian air-crash investigator Birger Andreas Bull explains that 30 minutes of the voice recordings could be heard, 1 hour of data from the day before could be saved from the flight data recorder, but only 12 seconds of the approach and 3 seconds right before the crash were recoverable. Bull said that even though it sounds like little information, it contains significant data about course, speed, motor settings and spoilers, and other technical information. But even if this confirms the investigation commission theory of a spoiler problem, the underlying cause is currently unknown. ^[16]