I'm on the plane!

摘要

It was just another flight for the nine passengers flying from Palmerston North to Christchurch, New Zealand, on the night of Friday 6 February 2003. As the aircraft approached its destination, the darkness and bad weather meant the pilot of the small aircraft, a Piper Navajo Chieftain, was flying the landing approach on instruments. Without warning, the aircraft crashed into a tree 2 kilometres ahead of the runway. The pilot and seven passengers were killed; only two survived. The accident investigation revealed that, during its entire approach, the aircraft had been below the glide path for the runway. It could even have crashed sooner; analysis of the instruments found that the aircraft's glide slope indicators were telling the pilot to descend further. So what went wrong? Investigators discovered that a call had been made from the pilot's cellphone just moments before the plane intercepted the signal from Christchurch airport's glide path beacons. The call remained connected for 3 minutes - right up to the moment the plane smashed into the tree. The investigators' report concluded that the "possibility must remain that...interference from the pilot's own cellphone might have caused erroneous indications."