The Airline That Didn’t Care About Safety | UTA Flight 141

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This is the story of UTA flight 141, by the way UTA stands for Union des Transports Africains, not to be confused with the french carrier UTA. UTA was an airline that flew in africa and the middle east and flight 141 was one of the few flights that they operated. Flight 141 was flown by a Boeing 727 and the route was long. Flight 141 would start in Conakry international airport in Guniea from there it would fly to Cotonou in benin from there it would head to beirut before ending up in dubai. On christmas day 2003, the 727 was making this weekly trip and was at cotonou international airport in benin. But before the plane even left the ground things were off to a bad start. Passenger boarding wasnt going well and there seemed to be a great deal of confusion, it was chaotic.Making it harder for the cabin crew everyone seemed to have a lot of cabin baggage and there seemed to be nowhere to put all that baggage. It was the same thing in the cargo holds, by the time the cargo handlers were done the cargo holds were full.
Once the chaos had been dealt with the pilots started working on the calculations for their flight to kufra. Kufra was an airport in Libya; it was a stopover on the way to beirut. The first officer talked to the UTA executives in the cockpit about their weight limits on the plane while the captain handled the ATC communications. As they carried out their checks the plane’s fuel tanks were topped off with 11.4 tons or 25000 pounds of fuel. The captain now having finished his work, set the flaps to 25 and turned off the AC units in preparation for the take off.

The first officer taxied the plane to the runway, and at 1:52 pm on Christmas 2003 flight 141. The pilots knew that this takeoff would need every ounce of performance that the plane had. They got to the end of the runway and applied their brakes and ramped the engines up to full power. After takeoff theyd climb at a steady three degrees to gain speed. With that they started rolling down the runway. At the start of the takeoff roll there were some people who were still standing in the cabin but they sat down once the plane was underway. As the plane picked up speed down the runway the controller in the tower noticed that flight 141 was taking quite a bit of time to get airborne. In the cockpit the captain saw that the plane had reached 137 knots, their rotate speed. The first officer pulled back on the yoke to take the 727 into the sky, but nothing happened; they were still on the ground. The captain called rotate, rotate an the first officer pulled back even harder. Slowly the nose of the 727 began to rise into the air. But flight 141 had run off of space. It had just taken off but it couldn't clear a concrete building on the extended centerline of the runway that housed the localizer antenna. The right landing gear impacted the building and was ripped off. The Plane banked slightly to the right and came crashing down on a beach just beyond the runway, most of the wreckage continued on till it ended up in the ocean. Of the 163 passengers onboard, only 22 survived. Unfortunately two people on the ground were also killed.

Right after a crash an investigative go teams agency is put into action. The go team has multiple sub teams, some teams survey the crash site, some teams talk with eyewitnesses and others gather records and files pertaining to the accident plane should the investigation need them. So in this fashion the investigators asked UTA airlines for the weight and balance sheet of flight 141. There are usually two copies of this document, one is given to the pilots and the other is kept by the airline. But strangely UTA had no copies of the weight and balance sheets for the accident airplane. Okay weird so they asked for the weight and balance sheet from the first flight on the 25th of december, they didnt have that either. Shockingly this airline had no documents

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