One year after Kenya Airways Boeing 737- 800 crashed at Mbanga Pongo in the outskirt of Douala, uncertainty and controversies continue to ensue as to the cause of the crash, and the payment of compensation to families of the victims.

After the crash, former Transport Minister, Dakole Daissala, had installed a Technical Commission charged with investigating into the cause of the plane crash. The Commission had representatives from the major stakeholders in the plane crash, namely the Kenya Airways, the Boeing Company and the Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority.

When the second and last flight recorder (black box) of the plane was found on June 9, hopes were high that the cause of the crash would be made known soon.One year after the crash, the cloud of uncertainty about the cause of the crash is still far from being cleared.

The General Manger of the Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority, Ignatius Sama Juma, told the population on May 5, to exercise patience, saying that the investigation is being meticulously carried out, in a bid to eschew errors.

Immediately after the crash, a satellite in France misled rescuers to the far away Lolodorf area in the South Province.But the blame for the wrong area of search had to be placed more on the absence of radar at the Douala International Airport. The Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority claims it cannot raise FCFA one billion to be able to acquire radar for the airport.

Fighting Off Culpability

A year after the crash, the major stakeholders are still locked in a cold war in which each party is desperately trying to deny culpability for the crash.Tim Proulx, a spokesman of the Chicago based Boeing Company, was quick to point out in a release that the company had no safety concern with its fleet of 737-800, adding that some 2000 of the model were currently in use worldwide.

The spokesman added that the Boeing 737-800 plane is equipped with an emergency transmitter that sends out an automatic locator signal, in the event of a rapid change in velocity.

Also, insinuations by some Kenya Airways officials that poor weather condition might have been a major cause of the disaster was quickly refuted by the Weather Observation

An official at weather observation unit at the Douala International Airport, Thomas Sabatem, while admitting that there was a thunderstorm that night, argued that a number of planes had left the Airport after Flight KQ 507 that same night, and had followed the same flight path without any problem.

Officials of Kenya Airways, on their part, rejected suggestions that the crash might have been caused by human error. The company had quickly released some information in a bid to show the long experience of the 53-year-old Francis Wamwea, who was chief pilot of the plane. The pilot was said to have worked for Kenya Airways for 20 years, and had hit a total of 8500 flight hours.

Meanwhile, the General Manager of the Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority, Ignatius Sama Juma, was quoted by CRTV to have hinted at his press briefing in Yaounde on May 5, 2008, that based on the content of the discussion between the flight captain and his assistant in the last 15 minutes before the crash, the plane ran into difficulty barely two minutes after it took off from the Douala Airport.

Some aeronautic experts in Douala have been suggesting that the failure of the emergency transmitter of the plane to function, might suggest that the engine of the plane suddenly went 'dead'. The experts have also suggested that if the crash was a result of poor weather, the plane would have fallen horizontally and not vertically as it happened.

Avoiding To Pay Compensation

The Post has learnt that any party which would be found culpable for the crash by the results of the technical inquiry will have to shoulder the heavy responsibility of paying compensation to the families of the 114 victims of the crash. This is the nightmare that the stakeholders are struggling to avoid.

Meanwhile, the Kenya Airways had, handing out of the corpses of the victims of the crash late last year, reportedly gave out to the different families of the victims, sums of money ranging from 10.000 to 30.000 dollars, as an advance payment of the compensation.

Whatever the case, dependable sources close to the Kenya Airways office in Douala have disclosed that the payment of the compensation to the families of the victims will only be done after the cause of the plane crash would have been officially established.

If the result of the inquiry blames the crash on technical fault, then the manufacturer of the plane will have to pay the entire compensation to the families of the victims. The aforementioned sums of money, which Kenya Airways gave as advance to the families of the victims, will in such a case be deducted and reimbursed to the Airways.

Meanwhile, if the result of the inquiry shows that the plane crash was caused by human error, then Kenya Airways will have to take full responsibility for the compensation.

But as it stands, the payment of compensation might have to wait for many years. The situation becomes the more disturbing when one considers the case of the Kenya Airways plane which crashed near Abidjan, Ivory Coast in February 2000, killing 169 persons.

There were only 10 survivors. Up till date, which is eight years later, the families of the victims have reportedly not yet received the bulk of the compensation.