South African Airways Flight 295 - Conspiracy Theories - David Klatzow's Theory

David Klatzow's Theory

Dr David Klatzow was one of the forensic scientists who, on his own admission, was retained to work on the case by Boeing's counsel around the time of the official enquiry. He subsequently criticized the Margo commission for spending an inordinate amount of time looking into "relatively irrelevant issues" and that the commission ignored the most important question: what was the source of the fire and who had been responsible for loading it onto the aircraft. Klatzow believes that there are certain irregularities in parts of the commission transcript that indicate that something on the CVR transcript had to be concealed.

Klatzow put forward a theory that the fire likely involved substances that would not normally be carried on a passenger aircraft and that the fire was not likely a wood, cardboard, or plastic fire. South Africa was under an arms embargo at the time; the South African government therefore had to buy arms clandestinely. His theory postulates that the South African government placed a rocket system in the cargo hold, and that vibration caused unstable ammonium perchlorate to ignite.

Klatzow contends that conversation of the crew suggests that the fire started above the South China Sea, shortly after takeoff; he believes that this indicates that the voice recorder was not working for a long period of the flight or that the crew turned it off. If this is the case, he says it is then likely that an unknown number of the passengers would have already died from smoke inhalation from the first fire. Klatzow believes that theory is consistent with reports that find most of the passengers were in the first class area of the plane at the front as smoke from the back of the plane forced them to move forward. The captain did not land the aircraft directly after the fire, Klatzow argues, because if he had he would have been arrested for endangering the lives of his passengers and it would have caused a major problem for South Africa, costing the country and SAA R400 million. Klatzow argues that the captain, who was also a reservist in the South African Air Force, would therefore have been ordered to carry on to South Africa in hopes of making it there before the aircraft's structural integrity gave in. These points have been refuted by others.

On 20 July 2011, retired SAA captain Clair Fichardt announced that he had made a statement in connection with the missing Jan Smuts air traffic control tapes, after he was persuaded to do so by Klatzow. Fichardt claimed that captain James Deale admitted to handing the tapes to captain Mickey Mitchell, who was chief pilot at the Johannesburg control centre on the night of the crash. Deale would further have stated that Gert van der Veer, head of SAA, and lawyer Ardie Malherbe were present during the transfer of the tapes. Earlier, during the TRC hearings, Klatzow had cross-examined Van der Veer, Mitchell and Vernon Nadel, the Operations Officer who was on duty.