The process of determining how a plane crashed is a complex and fascinating one. You think CSI and Law and Order are riveting, think about ALL the information that has to be gone through to determine what happened to an airplane to cause it crash. Today’s planes are built with so much redundancy, and for the most part, over maintenance and monitoring within FAA regulations make most planes exceptionally safe. Safer than your car, that’s for sure.
Still, tracking the paper trail of a crashed airplane takes on a new perspective for challenge when the paper trail is gone due to a company being out of business, so explains James Bernstein of NewsDay in the article, “Plane’s old paper trail impedes probe”:
When an airplane crashes, investigators have a host of duties to perform, including one that has to be done immediately: getting a hold of the plane’s original design and specifications from the manufacturer.
But what if the manufacturer no longer exists?
Federal investigators found themselves confronted with just such a situation last week, when an amphibian - capable of operating from water as well as land-based airports - crashed off Miami Beach, killing the two pilots and 18 passengers aboard.
The 58-year-old plane - dubbed the Mallard - was built by the former Grumman Corp. in Bethpage. Fifty-nine were built, all in the late 1940s.
The plane that crashed was operated by Chalk’s Ocean Airways, which since the accident has grounded the remaining four Mallards in its fleet.
The problem for the Federal Aviation Administration is that there is no Grumman anymore, or at least, not in any form that helps the investigation. In 1994 Long Island’s largest private employer was acquired by Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles, and the combined company is now known as Northrop Grumman Corp. Since then, the Bethpage operation has all but ceased working on airframes, and its engineers, expertise and archives have all dispersed.
Eventually, they are able to track down some of the paperwork, but it is a lot of work to cover 58 years of maintenance records to help determine the cause.
