By Cathy Maulidi:
Friday, members of Parliament from the opposition bench demanded that the House should discuss the interim report released by the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU).
Member of Parliament for Thyolo Thava Mary Navicha stood in the House demanding that the matter be discussed owing to its seriousness.
“Can we have the government talk to this House about the report please,” Navicha stated.
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Rumphi East Member of Parliament Kamlepo Kalua also demanded that the House should discuss the interim report.
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“This is a report talking about a plane crash that killed Malawi’s Vice President and someone whose body was brought into the House. Some of us were arrested on the same, we must discuss it now,” he said.
But Speaker of Parliament Catherine Gotani Hara said the House couldn’t discuss the matter as the House was not yet furnished with the report.
“In terms of us discussing the report, we have not received the report and it would be difficult to discuss it,” Hara said.
In his reaction, Minister of Transport and Public Works Jacob Hara said government will not respond to the report until a comprehensive one is out.
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“We don’t own the report. The report is there on the website. This is just an interim report, a comprehensive report is yet to be released and we will comment once it is out,” Hara said.
However, UTM spokesperson Felix Njawala said the report has just added questions to the pile that party has had.
“But will not react now. We have given the report to our experts to analyse and give us their report. After that we will release our statement,” said Njawala.
And opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) spokesperson Shadrick Namalomba said Malawians deserve to know what really happened and therefore the report should be brought into the House and be discussed.
Commenting on his Facebook page, one of late Chilima lawyers Khumbo Soko wrote:
“The interim report glaringly does not say anything about what brought the plane down. It shows, however, an erratic flight path at varying altitudes, between 950 hrs and 10:16 hrs, the time of impact. There was no ‘May Day’ or distress call from the crew to air traffic control. This would mean that despite the obvious challenges, they did not observe anything worth communicating to ATC [air traffic control]. Otherwise, they would have mentioned it during their 10:12 conversation with air traffic control.”
In his analysis, Soko adds that the aircraft had no flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder.
“So we will never know the conversations that the crew had with each other in the minutes leading to the crash. And some other performance related data will simply not be there for further analysis.
“The aircraft also did not have a functioning ‘emergency locator transmitter’ because the battery expired in 2004. The spare parts were apparently not available. And we had no budget for them anyway. Clearly, we had no business putting a Vice President on such a substandard aircraft. What really happened here? Mwina tidikire [may be let’s wait] the final report,” he wrote.
