By Peter Fabricius Foreign Editor
Pilot error or aircraft failure? That's the question an international investigation team will try to answer as they pore over the millions of fragments of wreckage of the Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A330-200 outside Tripoli Airport.
An experienced pilot who has flown into Tripoli said conditions leading to a dangerous, blinding "white-out" could have disoriented the two pilots of the plane, causing them to plough into the ground short of the runway.
But questions remain about the aircraft itself, after the loss of an Air France A330-200 in the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Brazil to Paris last year. At the time, pilots and other experts expressed concern that critical electronic and computer components - the A330-200 is one of the most automated "fly by wire" passenger planes in the world - may have been at fault or that crew were not trained to handle emergencies caused by electronic glitches.
The experienced former commercial pilot, who did not want to be named, said landing at Tripoli Airport directly into the rising sun could cause a "white-out". With the rising sun reflecting off dust from the desert, visibility was even less than at night.
But he stressed that the cause of this crash, which happened just after 6am yesterday, still had to be determined by official accident investigators.
Speculation is that the pilots of the plane, which was coming from Joburg, might have been blinded as they flew east towards runway 09 just as the sun was coming up.
"If the reported time (of the accident) is correct, the accident happened one minute before sea-level sunrise. With the airport slightly higher, the approach would have involved transitioning between sunlit and shaded airspace," the former pilot said. "Visibility reports suggest dusty/hazy conditions (it's sandstorm season), with night-time visibility 6 000 to 5 000m, dropping to 2 000m after sunrise. Sunlit dust may cause white-out conditions... the sunlit part of the approach would've been flown virtually blind.
"The aircraft made some or all of the approach in sunlight, possibly descending into earth shadow shortly before hitting the ground.
"The impact position was about 1.5km from threshold (the edge of the runway)... the fragmented wreckage suggests that the impact was in an unusual attitude; a wings-level, low, descent-approach-speed impact on flat terrain with hardly any meaningful obstacles would not have resulted in such disintegration. A likely scenario: a sharp, low-level corrective bank when seeing approach lights, resulting in a wing tip clipping ground (or buildings)."
Investigators of the Air France Flight 447 crash are no closer to a conclusion because vital "black box" recording equipment, detailing the aircraft's last moments, have not been found.
Yet, there was speculation last year about the safety of the A330-200, in particular about whether there might have been flaws in in the computer software, or with the wiring inside the plane.
In October 2008 an Australian Qantas A330-200 had had to make an emergency landing after plunging twice in clear weather and unexplained circumstances.
Media reports quoted Charles-Henri Tardivat, a former crash investigator, as saying it seemed that there was only one reason AF447 crashed and the Qantas plane did not. "They were able to recover control because they were flying in daylight and perfect weather. They could see what was happening, even without their instruments. But AF447 was caught in a violent storm at night. The A330 is a very well-built aircraft, but there obviously is a problem somewhere... we need to find it."
Airbus has sent investigators to work with an international team at the crash site in Libya.