Fatal Fatigue

Fighting a blinding snowstorm, the four-engine Vanguard turboprop locked onto the approach system at Basel-Mulhouse Airport and received permission to land. Inside Invicta International Airlines' flight "Oscar Papa" were 138 passengers, most of them housewives from neighboring towns in southern England on a package "shopping tour" to Switzerland. They were singing and chatting when they received routine orders to fasten their seat belts and were told: "We will be landing at Basel Airport within ten minutes." Oscar Papa never made it.

Though the visibility of 900 yds. was well within the Vanguard's safety zone and the pilot made the prescribed approach, he announced to the controllers in the airport tower that he wanted to try again. After a second turn, the Vanguard, sinking rapidly, was in a perfect slot for landing. But to the controller's surprise, the pilot suddenly said that he had overshot the runway. Then radio contact broke off.

The Vanguard's wing hit a tree, and the plane spun into a wooded plateau under full power, cutting a swath through the firs as the front part of the fuselage disintegrated in a shower of metal fragments and human bodies. Of the 144 aboard, only 39 survived.

A British team of investigators recovered the Vanguard's "black box" flight recorder and took it to London for analysis. Said John Owen, head of the team: "It is obvious that the pilot was not where he thought he was. It is hoped that the tapes from the black box, when they are analyzed, will explain why."

While the reasons for last week's accident are being studied, the crash gave added impact to a controversial report issued just days earlier by the British Airline Pilots Association. The 150-page report blames six of the ten major crashes of British airlines between 1966 and 1970 on nothing more complicated than pilot fatigue. It noted that all six crashes, in which 257 lives were lost, occurred during takeoff and landing, "when the work load is highest and fatigue at its worst." In five of the accidents, "the crew apparently flew a fully serviceable aircraft into the ground."

Some of the near misses were almost equally frightening. One captain on an intercontinental flight to Darwin, Australia, reported that after 14 hours of duty and 25 hours without sleep, "both my first officers fell asleep more than once ... and, in fact, I had to waken one of them to give him the approach briefing." Another pilot dozed off while awaiting clearance to take off on a London to Frankfort flight. In one instance, an exhausted flight crew missed an airport altogether. It landed at Sharjah on the Persian Gulf rather than at Dubai, which is six miles away.

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