KENYA AIRWAYS FLIGHT 507

'Kenya Airways Flight KQ 507' was a Boeing 737 flight of Kenya Airways flying from Douala International Airport in Douala, Cameroon, to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, which crashed on 5 May 2007. The flight originated from Port Bouet Airport in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, but made a stop in Douala to pick up more passengers. It departed Douala at 0105 GMT (0005 local time) on 5 May. It had been scheduled to arrive in Nairobi at 0315 GMT (0615 local time).
Kenya Airways has released a passenger list indicating that the 105 passengers onboard were citizens of 26 different countries; none of them were Kenyan. The entire 9-member crew were from Kenya.^[1]
The plane broke up into small pieces and came to rest mostly submerged in a forested swamp, 5.42 km to the south (176°) of the end of the Douala International Airport's runway 12.^[2] There were no survivors.^[3]

Contents

Crash

Investigation

Nationalities of the victims

Notable Passengers

References

External links

Crash

Flight 507 was one of three flights scheduled to depart Douala airport around midnight on May 5. It was being flown using one of three 737-800s that Kenya Airways had recently acquired from Singapore Aircraft Leasing Enterprise.^[4] The airframe first flew on October 9, 2006^[5] and was delivered from Boeing later that month.^[6]
The aircrews of the other two flights, Cameroon Airways and Royal Air Maroc, elected to wait for the weather to improve, while the Kenya Airways crew, perhaps because they had already been delayed over an hour, elected to take off.^[7] Contact with the plane was lost soon after takeoff from Douala; it did not report in upon reaching 5,000 feet as was procedure. The control tower may have received a distress signal from the aircraft before the loss of contact^[8], though later reports contradicted this claim.
Kenya Airways has set up a crisis management center at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi.
On 6 May 2007, Cameroon's state radio interrupted broadcasts to report that wreckage of the plane had been found near Mvengue, southwest of the capital Yaounde, only to say later it could not confirm the report.^[9]
Later that day Kenyan Airways officials reported that the wreckage of the aircraft had been found 5.42 kilometres south (176°) of the end of the airport's runway 12, some 120 kilometres from the site mentioned in the earlier radio broadcasts. Initial reports from the crash site did not mention survivors.^[10]
Further, Kenya Airways Group Managing Director Titus Naikuni said in Nairobi that local fishermen had led rescuers to the crash site.
"We are told the aircraft was covered by a canopy of trees, and that was the delay in sighting the crash site," he said.
Cameroon's Minister of State for Territorial Administration Hamidou Yaya Marafa told a news conference that day, "All I can say for now is that the wreckage of the plane has been located in the small village of Mbanga Pongo, in the Douala III subdivision. We are putting in place rescue measures."^[11]
On 7 May 2007 director of Civil Protection Service of Cameroon Jean-Pierre Nana claimed that "there are no chances that there will be any survivors because almost the entire body of the plane was buried inside the swamp"³.
On 8 May Kenya Airways reported that 29 bodies had been recovered from the crash site while reports from Cameroon reported that over 40 had been recovered. Workers reported that the bodies are "badly disfigured" and that identification would be difficult. Heavy rains in the area continued to hamper all efforts.^[12]

Investigation

Early attention as to the cause of the crash had centered on the possibility of dual engine flameout during heavy weather. Several clues had pointed in this direction including the time the plane had been in the air, the distress call issued by the aircraft (both later disputed), the meteorological conditions at the time of the crash, and the nose-down position of the wreckage. Experts theorized that this would be consistent with the plane losing power in both engines, attempting to glide back to the airport, and stalling during the attempt.^[13] Other experts theorized that lightning had played a role in the crash.^[14] The National Transportation Safety Board of the United States sent a go-team to assist with the investigation.^[15]
On 8 May 2007 "Kenya Airways chief pilot James Ouma told a news conference in Nairobi that Kenyan investigators believe the jet crashed about 30 seconds after takeoff. Officials in Cameroon had said earlier that they lost contact with the jet 11-13 minutes into the flight."²
On 12 May 2007, DNA testing of relatives of the victims began in Douala.^[16]
The flight data recorder was recovered, and Kenya subsequently requested that the "black box" be analyzed in Canada, not the US or Europe. The reason stated was the ongoing "conflict" between Boeing vs. Airbus in the global airliner marketplace. Kenya also stressed that Canada's bilingual nature would ease communications between it, French-speaking Cameroon, and English-speaking Kenya.^[17] The analysis did take place in Canada and was completed on May 30, though the results of the analysis were not immediately disclosed because only Cameroon may release such data per the Convention on International Civil Aviation.^[18]
The cockpit voice recorder took much longer to locate, as it was buried in 15 meters of mud, amidst the wreckage of the cockpit.^[19] But it was eventually located on 16 June 2007 and prepared for transport to Canada for examination as the FDR had been.^[20]
On 29 June 2007 a suspicious article appeared in the Business Daily Africa that claimed the pilots had been exonerated from blame in the crash. However, the article failed to explain who had exonerated them and why. The article also claimed examination of the DVR had shown no mechanical failures on the plane, implied that weather was the sole reason for the crash, and that the CVR had not yet been recovered, despite widespread reporting 13 days earlier that it had been.^[21] Inquiries with Business Daily Africa as to their sources for this article were not answered.

Nationalities of the victims

★ 37 Cameroon

★ 15 India

★ 9 Kenya (crew members)

★ 7 South Africa

★ 6 Côte d'Ivoire; Nigeria

★ 5 People's Republic of China; United Kingdom

★ 3 Niger

★ 2 Central African Republic; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Equatorial Guinea

★ 1 Burkina Faso; Comoros; Republic of the Congo; Egypt; Ghana; Mali; Mauritania; Mauritius; Senegal; South Korea; Sweden; Switzerland; Tanzania; Togo; United States.
Source: Kenya Airways¹

Notable Passengers

★ Campbell Utton - CEO MTN Group Cameroon

★ Sarah Stewart - CFO MTN Group Cameroon

References

1. Full list of Passengers of Flight KQ 507
2. Grim Work Continues at Plane Crash Site
3. No chance of survivors from Kenya plane - Cameroon
4. Plane was one of KQ's newly acquired crafts
5.
planespotters.net
6.
airliners.net
7. Reconstructing Flight 507's Final Moments
8. Plane Carrying 115 People Crashes
9. Reuters - Searchers comb dense Cameroon forest for Kenya plane
10. UPDATE 5-Cameroon finds Kenya plane, no word of survivors
11. UPDATE 6-Cameroon finds Kenyan Airways plane
12. Flight KQ 507:29 bodies recovered
13. Engine Failure Studied in Cameroon Crash
14. Rescuers recover human remains at Cameroon crash site
15. NTSB SENDING TEAM TO ASSIST IN THE INVESTIGATION OF A 737 CRASH IN CAMEROON - NTSB - Obtained May 8, 2007.
16. KQ flight: DNA tests begin in Douala
17. Govt Wants 'Black Box' Analysed in Canada
18. Analysis of KQ 507's flight Flight Data Recorder complete
19. KQ Resumes Cameroon Flights
20. Kenyan flight KQ 507 - Cockpit voice recorder recovered
21. KQ exonerated from blame in Douala crash

External links

★ Pre-accident pictures of the aircraft

★ Kenya Airways official web site

★ Airliner crashes in Cameroon — ''Houston Chronicle''

★ Investigations and photos of the Kenya Airways Flight 507 crash