Atlantic Airways Flight 670 - Incidents

Incidents

The aircraft had 16 people on board, 12 passengers and a crew of 4. Atlantic Airways chief Magni Arge said that eleven of the passengers were Norwegian and one foreigner. Three of the crew members were Faroese, and one was a Dane. News reports first indicated that 13 people had been rescued. Later it emerged that only 12 people, among them the pilots, had been rescued from the fire and that four died - three Norwegian passengers and one Faroese flight attendant. The aircraft was one of several carrying construction workers for Aker Kværner Stord to construction at Aukra related to the Ormen Lange field.

The pilot of another Atlantic Airways flight which landed 20 minutes earlier did not report any unusual landing conditions at the airport though the runway was wet from rain. On September 2, about a month prior to this accident, an Atlantic Airways flight was forced to make an emergency landing at Bergen Airport, Flesland due to failure to extend the flaps. Although the flaps can be considered a part of the braking system, they are mainly used in the air, to increase lift to enable a lower flight and landing speed. The flaps failure in September 2006 was detected before the scheduled landing at Vágar Airport as a part of the in-flight checks and the plane redirected to Bergen because its airport had longer runways, required for the higher expected landing speed. The same plane made a second emergency landing 3 days later in Bergen with the same problem. This plane was not the one involved in the accident in Stord. Failure to extend the flaps is a known problem of the BAe-146 and is avoided by adjusting the flaps mechanism precisely every two years and lubricating it for every 10th flight. Apparently Atlantic Airways had problems with these adjustments in September.

The condition of the airport's fire station and control tower have also been criticized, and there was in fact a newspaper article, written hours before the crash, reporting that funding to upgrade the facilities had been denied.

The black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, both sustained serious heat damage in the fire, and it was feared they were so damaged that no data could be extracted from them. However, much of the data was still retrievable.

According to the Faroese newspaper Dimmalætting, the aircraft was 20 years old, and was the first one purchased by Atlantic Airways in 1988. Early in the 1990s the same plane slid off the runway at Vágar Airport, but nobody was injured. The reason for that accident was that the pilot had landed too far along the runway due to bad weather conditions.

At an international football match on October 11 between France and the Faroes, a minute's silence was held in memory of the dead.

On 17 January 2007, the readers of the Faroese newspaper Dimmalætting voted the two flight attendants, Maibritt Magnussen and Guðrun Joensen †, the Faroese persons of the year (ársins føroyingar).