Head Of Airport Trade Group Says Governments Should Back Off And Let Investigators Determine Cause Of Metrojet Crash In Egypt
(CBS) -- The head of the international trade group that calls itself "the voice of the world's airports" wants the governments intensely interested in finding a cause for the Metrojet crash in Egypt to back off and let the investigators do their job.
Airports Council International world director general Angela Gittens said the search for a cause is complicated by competing political ramifications. She said Russia does not want to be seen as a terror target or lax on safety. She said Egypt does not want it seen as an "inside job." She said the United Kingdom and other countries barring flights from the Sinai don't want to look unprepared.
Not that the airports know what to do.
"Don't know. What happened? What happened? Once you tell me what happened I can tell you how to fix it," said Gittens, who has overseen operations at the world's busiest airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield International, as well as Miami International Airport. She also has served as second-in-command of San Francisco airport operations.
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Speaking to an audience at the International Aviation Law Institute and Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Studies at DePaul University, Gittens said a quick investigation is likely to be a bad one.
"I have to tell you I have been quite concerned in the last couple of accidents where there's been this rush to judgment," she said. "This industry got to be as safe as it is because of the care and analysis that is taken to review accidents and incidents and find out the truth and deal with the implications of that."
Gittens said someone is likely to be embarrassed politically.
"If it was a mechanical failure it's disturbing that an aircraft was allowed to be in that condition, and obviously if there's a bomb on the plane, it was disturbing that there was such a security failure," she said.
She called the Metrojet investigation an "Instagram type of situation," and said, "You can run off in a lot of different directions which have no value by jumping to conclusions without analysis."
U.S. and British officials have cited intelligence reports as indicating that the Oct. 31 flight from the Sinai resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg was brought down by a bomb on board. All 224 people onboard, most of them Russian tourists, were killed.
Islamic State extremists claimed they brought down the plane, without offering proof, saying it was in retaliation for Moscow's airstrikes that began a month earlier against fighters in Syria.
