What happened to the Sundance Resources miners on Saturday morning while flying over West Africa?
Ben Sandilands looks at the shreds of evidence in the Congolese and Cameroon reports, and the context of Africa’s dangerous aviation game.
The facts: The entire six-man senior management team of WA-based Sundance Resources boarded their chartered small twin-engined turboprop, make unknown at this stage, and took off into stormy equatorial skies at about 9am local time from the Cameroon capital, Yaounde, bound for the Mbalam iron ore project just across the border in the Congo, intending to land at the town of Yangadou about an hour later.
The Sundance Resources team included coal billionaire Ken Talbot, and there were another five other persons on board, two of whom would have been the pilots.
The flight was last heard from about 23 minutes after departure, in a routine radio call. Later that morning, time unknown, the Cameroon authorities were sufficiently concerned about the disappearance of the flight to put one C-130 Hercules and two smaller aircraft into the air to make a visual and radio signal search of the heavily forested terrain under and adjacent to the filed flight plan.
Nothing was seen or heard. The Congolese authorities asked the Cameroon flights not to land on the Congo side of the border, and also said they had not received any reports of a crash.
If in fact no distress calls were made, and no emergency beacons were activated, the inference is that disaster struck quickly and that the plane was completely destroyed by impact with the forest canopy and ground.
Similarities with other crashes: On May 5, 2007, a Kenya Airways Boeing 737-800 vanished after taking off from Douala, Cameroon, in similar jungle territory, with 114 people on board bound for Nairobi. It was not found for more than a day, even though it had crashed less than six kilometres from the end of the runway, submerging itself in a swamp obscured by a dense forest canopy. It took two weeks to retrieve approximately 40 sets of remains.
Pilot error was blamed for the crash, in which the jet apparently slipped into an excessive bank angle in a storm that caused other pilots to hold their airliners, which had been due to depart at a similar time and wait until it had passed.
The difficulty of seeing the 737, which was first noticed as some pieces of tin in the mud in the equatorial forest underlines the problems searchers for the small Sundance Resources charter turbo-prop face, which was most likely an aged Russian or US made type.
The terrain can be compared to that in Papua New Guinea, and the difficulty searchers had locating the Twin Otter turbo-prop that crashed near the village of Isurava on August 11 last year, killing 13 people including nine Australian trekkers while it was attempting to descend through driving rain and low visibility to the Kokoda airstrip.
Outside of South Africa and Morocco, the air safety record at the scheduled and charter levels across Africa is dismal, although some of the worst accidents have happened to European charter or holiday carriers.
Australian parallels: On June 26, 2007, a Skippers Aviation Embraer EMB-120ER turboprop with 31 people on board nearly crashed on final approach to the Jundee mine airstrip in WA.
The ATSB final report into this serious incident reads like a tour through the wild west, or worst, of Australian air transport.
It details bad piloting, dismal airline management, inadequate training and a lack of executive and employee comprehension of the basics of aircraft fuel load error prevention, and a streak of good luck, all coming together in what was close to a tragic stuff up.
Did the Sundance miners break any rules? They ignored the engraved-in-granite first rule of common sense that is insisted upon by the risk managers of major resources companies doing business in Africa, and that is, NEVER fly everyone on a company mission on the same flight. Not even the same scheduled flight. To have done so on a small charter operation is unthinkable.
Wilson Tuckey, who has linked this gamble by the Sundance miners to the resources super tax is, as usual, behaving like a moron.
It was a CASA C-212 twin turboprop.
Thank you for helping to bring some clarity to awful situation. Your own comments are spot on and the Liberals should be deeply ashamed of themselves for trying to obtain political mileage out of the issue. Ken Talbot and colleagues have been researching and investing in African mining for years as well as in other parts of the world. Ken is a decent man who is a well liked and respected member of the Queensland mining community and a committed supporter over many years to charities such as The Abused Child Trust (now known as Act for Kids) and many other NGOs. We are all still hoping that the group will be found alive and rescued and the comments this morning from Wilson Tuckey are insensitive beyond belief – a complete disgrace! He should be made to apologise to the Parliament.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
Ben it’s good to hear that some companies are both realistic and wise enough to have the policies you suggest. When I moved from hospital to private practice as a young doctor I would take short spots of time off to assist in the globalisation of a fashion business I had with my sister, a top designer. We would never travel on the same plane together, nor car except on a few occasions when it was too inconvenient to avoid. We have each had a few very dangerous MVA’s separately and been very lucky to survive them all.
Dr Harvey – you should learn to drive defensively.