Parties Involved
Four of the passengers were Germans – Steffen Braun, 36; Klaus Friedrich, 48; Matthias Morche, 22; and Peter Schmidt, 31. The others were a Frenchman, Pascal Rol, 43, a Swiss, Heinz Hoefler, 61, and a Spaniard who traveled to Zurich on a Swissair flight from Madrid, and of which no details are available. The three person crew included Moldovan pilot Pavel Gruzin, Slovakian copilot Rastislav Kolesar and a French flight attendant, Severine Jabrin. There were no survivors.
At that time, Crossair was a majority owned subsidiary of SAirGroup. The crash of Crossair Flight LX498 was the first time in Crossair's 25-year history that the regional airline had lost an aircraft, and was the deadliest accident to hit the SAirGroup since the crash of Swissair Flight 111, a MD11 flying from New York to Geneva crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia, Canada in September 1998, killing all 229 aboard.
At the time, Crossair operated 17 Saab-340 type planes, but eventually phased them out with Embraer ERJ-145 regional jets. The crash came about in the midst of a bitter labor-management dispute between Crossair and its pilots over a possible pay raise and work rules changes. The pilots' union had just canceled pay agreements with Crossair in December, 1999, with a termination effective in summer 2000. In addition, and prior to the accident, two Crossair pilots told Swiss media that some foreign pilots employed by Crossair pose a safety risk because of an insufficient knowledge of English. These two pilots were fired by Crossair, but were then elected to head the pilots' union, "Crossair Cockpit Personnel (CCP)". Flight LX498's crew consisted of a captain from Moldova and a copilot from Slovakia. An investigation of the accident later revealed that Pilot Gruzin and copilot Kolesar were only able to communicate with each other in English, but Gruzin's ability to speak English was too limited to hold more than a basic conversation.
After the crash, both Crossair and CCP, including the pilots who had previously spoken to the media and been fired, publicly stated that the coincidence between the accident and the dispute was very unfortunate and that reports about pilot error being involved in the crash were speculation, although this conclusion was later established to be the probable cause of the accident.
Read more about this topic: Crossair Flight 498
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