November 28: On This Day in World History … briefly
When the Helderberg last informed Mauritian air traffic control of its position, its report was incorrectly understood to be relative to the airport rather than its next waypoint, which caused the subsequent search to be concentrated too close to Mauritius.
1987: SAA Helderberg crash kills all 159 passengers
South African Airways Flight 295 was a commercial flight from Taiwan to South Africa. On 28 November 1987, the aircraft serving the flight, a Boeing 747 Combi named Helderberg, experienced a catastrophic in-flight fire in the cargo area, broke-up in mid-air, and crashed into the Indian Ocean east of Mauritius, killing all 159 people on board. An extensive salvage operation was mounted to try to recover the flight data recorders, one of which was recovered from a depth of 4 900 metres (16 100 ft). The official inquiry, headed by Judge Cecil Margo, was unable to determine the cause of the fire. This lack of a conclusion led to conspiracy theories being advanced in the years following the accident.
Taiwanese authorities stated that 58 passengers began flying in Taipei, including 30 Taiwanese citizens, 19 South Africans, 3 Japanese, two Mauritians, one Dane, one Netherlander, one Briton, and one West German. The other passengers transferred from other flights arriving in Taipei, and as such their nationalities were not known to Taiwanese authorities. At least two passengers died of smoke inhalation. The rest died from the extreme trauma sustained in the crash.
In 2014, the South African investigative journalist Mark D Young presented a theory that a short circuit in the onboard electronics may have caused the fire. The so-called wet arc tracking arises from the action of moisture when the insulation of live wires is damaged. A leakage current to another damaged wire with the respective potential difference may form. The resulting flashover may reach temperatures of up to 5 000 °C (9 000 °F). This temperature is sufficient to ignite the thermal-acoustic insulation blankets that were still used until the late 1990s. Such a short circuit caused the fire on board Swissair Flight 111, resulting in the crash of the aircraft in 1998.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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