airline pilots suspended over mid-air photo stunt
07-13-2005, 03:32 PM
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airline pilots suspended over mid-air photo stunt
Condor Pilots Suspended After Flying Risky Mid-Air Maneuver
July 12 (Bloomberg) -- Condor Airlines, a unit of German travel company Thomas Cook, put two of its pilots on suspension after they flew a risky maneuver with 235 passengers on board above the northern Atlantic, south of Greenland.
The two Condor pilots left their official route to take a picture of a colleague who was on his last flight before going into retirement, several British newspapers including The Sun and The Mirror reported. Mistakenly, they closed up to a wrong plane belonging to Thomas Cook U.K., whose pilot had to do a nose dive to prevent a collision, the papers said.
"The pilot and his co-pilot have been suspended from duty immediately after the incident happened,'' Thomas Cook spokesman Boris Ogursky said in a telephone interview today from Oberursel, Germany. "There never has been a concrete risk of a collision.'' He declined to give further details since investigations are still ongoing.
The collision warning systems automatically raised an alarm when the planes closed up to a height of 183 meters between each other, instead of the mandatory 300 meters. The horizontal distance between both aircrafts was at least 1.8 kilometers.
Louis Garneau, a spokesman for NAV Canada, the nonprofit company that operates the country's air-traffic control system, said he couldn't immediately comment.
Thomas Cook, the owner of Condor Airlines, is a joint-venture of Lufthansa AG, Europe's second-biggest airline, and KarstadtQuelle AG, Germany's largest department-store operator.
July 12 (Bloomberg) -- Condor Airlines, a unit of German travel company Thomas Cook, put two of its pilots on suspension after they flew a risky maneuver with 235 passengers on board above the northern Atlantic, south of Greenland.
The two Condor pilots left their official route to take a picture of a colleague who was on his last flight before going into retirement, several British newspapers including The Sun and The Mirror reported. Mistakenly, they closed up to a wrong plane belonging to Thomas Cook U.K., whose pilot had to do a nose dive to prevent a collision, the papers said.
"The pilot and his co-pilot have been suspended from duty immediately after the incident happened,'' Thomas Cook spokesman Boris Ogursky said in a telephone interview today from Oberursel, Germany. "There never has been a concrete risk of a collision.'' He declined to give further details since investigations are still ongoing.
The collision warning systems automatically raised an alarm when the planes closed up to a height of 183 meters between each other, instead of the mandatory 300 meters. The horizontal distance between both aircrafts was at least 1.8 kilometers.
Louis Garneau, a spokesman for NAV Canada, the nonprofit company that operates the country's air-traffic control system, said he couldn't immediately comment.
Thomas Cook, the owner of Condor Airlines, is a joint-venture of Lufthansa AG, Europe's second-biggest airline, and KarstadtQuelle AG, Germany's largest department-store operator.
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