On Monday lost a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner during a flight from Sydney to Auckland, New Zealand – the bow apparently sank downwards. At least 50 people on board the Dreamliner with a total of 263 passengers and nine crew members were injured in the incident.
The Chilean airline Latam immediately blamed the loss of altitude on a technical problem. It fits that one passenger reported in interviews after the flight that the pilot, while inspecting the cabin immediately after the incident, told him of a sudden failure of the flight instruments.
Now one of the pilot seats is apparently being targeted by investigators. “A movement of the seat caused the aircraft to tilt downwards,” the trade magazine reports Air current citing a senior Latam security official. According to the information available, it is assumed that the seat movement was caused by the pilot and was not intentional. In this context, the possibility of an electrical short circuit is also being examined, it said, citing a second insider. There is no official confirmation from Latam about this.
Boeing could follow the information from Air current according to the 787-Inform operators as part of a so-called Multi-Operator Message (MOM), which would then contain details of possible inspections. Such a MOM would be an indication that this could be a fleet-wide problem. However, Boeing did not want to comment on this report when asked by the Reuters news agency and instead referred to the investigative authorities.
Experts point out that most aircraft accidents are not caused by a single technical defect, but by a chain of several errors.
Meanwhile, authorities in New Zealand announced that the plane’s voice recorder and flight data memory had been confiscated.
The airline Latam is based in Chile – the 787-9 should have continued to Santiago after a stopover in Auckland.