Wednesday, Sep 15, 2010

(This story was originally published Tuesday)

DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--Initial data analysis from the black boxes of the United Parcel Services Inc., or UPS, plane that crashed in Dubai on Sept. 3 indicates that a fire warning preceded smoke in the cockpit and that the crew turned back to Dubai despite being offered to land at Qatar's capital Doha, United Arab Emirates authorities said Tuesday.

"The crew were offered by Bahrain Air Traffic Control to land at Doha, but they decided to return back to Dubai, then they experienced cockpit visibility and commutation problems," the U.A.E.'s General Civil Aviation Authority, or GCAA, said in a statement carried by the official WAM news agency.

The GCAA said the crew declared Mayday, or distress, later on and that the captain was in control up until the end of the recording.

Data from both the digital flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder are being analyzed at the United States National Transportation Safety Board, which is part of a GCAA-led team investigating the crash.

Initial analysis of the downloaded data confirmed smoke in the cockpit, as reported by the crew about 28 minutes after take-off, but also said there was a fire warning before that.

UPS Flight No. 6, a three-year-old Boeing Co. 747-400 aircraft, was headed to Cologne, Germany, from Dubai when it indicated through information received from Bahrain that it was returning to the Dubai airport "with smoke in the cockpit, unable to maintain altitude and requested the airport for landing," according to the GCAA's first report.

Investigators are trying to determine why the experienced crew, after reporting smoke and declaring an emergency about 20 minutes after take-off, decided to return to Dubai rather than opting to land at a closer strip.

The plane had returned back from the Bahrain Flight Information Region when it crashed in Dubai 50 minutes after it took off on Friday evening, the report said.

The crash is the first fatal aircraft incident for package-delivery giant UPS.

-By Nour Malas, Dow Jones Newswires; +9715 0 2890223, nour.malas@dowjones.com

Copyright (c) 2010 Dow Jones & Co.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

15-09-10 0344GMT