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| Olde Tyme Religion |
| Tunisian pilot who prayed as his plane went down jailed in Italy |
| 2009-03-25 |
| Insh' Allah Aircraft Maintainence meets Insh' Allah Piloting with predictable results... A pilot accused of praying when he should have been taking emergency measures to avoid a crash in which 16 people died has been sentenced to 10 years in jail by an Italian court. Captain Chafik Gharby was at the controls of a plane belonging to the Tunisian charter airline Tuninter that crashed in the sea off the coast of Sicily four years ago. The 23 survivors were left swimming for their lives, some clinging to a piece of the fuselage that stayed afloat after the turbo-prop aircraft broke up on impact. Gharby was at first hailed as a hero for having saved the lives of most of the passengers. But after an investigation, he, his co-pilot, and several Tuninter executives and technicians were charged with a range of offences including manslaughter. The court in Palermo agreed with prosecutors that the chain of events that led to the crash began when a wrong part was installed in the ill-fated plane, a Franco-Italian ATR 72. A mechanic accidentally fitted an outwardly identical fuel gauge intended for the smaller ATR 42. The plane took off from Bari, bound for the Tunisian island of Djerba, on 6 August 2005. As it flew over Sicily, its engines slowed to a halt, even though the instrument panel showed the aircraft had enough fuel left for the flight. The judges accepted the prosecution case that the pilots, instead of making a crash landing on the sea, should have been able to glide the plane to Palermo airport. Instead, Gharby was said to have panicked. In cockpit recordings entered as evidence he was heard calling for the help of "Allah and Muhammad his prophet". Sorry. Not today, Chafik... His lawyer, Francesca Coppi, said: "Faced with danger, he invoked his god as would any one of us." She described her client as "a broken man" who was "convinced he did everything possible to save as many lives as possible". The co-pilot, Ali Kebaier, also received a 10-year sentence. Tuninter's director-general, Moncef Zouari, and the company's technical director were both given nine years. A mechanic and two executives in the airline's maintenance department each received eight-year sentences. Two of the accused were acquitted. The remaining seven defendants, who were not in court to hear the verdict, will not have to go to prison until the appeals process has been exhausted. Of the passengers who died, two were Tunisians. The other 14 were Italians and many of their relatives travelled to Palermo on chartered buses to hear the verdict. Angela Trentadue, whose 27-year-old daughter died in the crash, welcomed the sentences. Another relative, who did not wish to be identified, said: "I wanted to hug the judge." |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #5 Tu3031 Apologies for not reading yout comment with more interest before running my mouth of. |
| Posted by: Shinenter Johnson6022 2009-03-25 14:01 |
| #4 "#2 Cockpit voice recorder... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdAgu38K0Mo I dunno. It's not like the guy rolled out the rug and started banging his head on the floor." Not to argue, but what I hear in this tape is incompetence & very shitty comunication skills. I think that those two things counted more towards the guilty verdict than the praying. That being said, I have worked with muslims in law-enforcement and i found the tendency to, per instance starting to pray to allah instead of doing something constructive like, I don't know checking someone's pulse & breathing while tending to a fellow muslim very disturbing and more than a little unprofessional. |
| Posted by: Shinenter Johnson6022 2009-03-25 13:58 |
| #3 I would find either "OH GOD, Or" OH SHIT' acceptable "Praying, but tending to the controls while "Praying" is an absolutely Necessity. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2009-03-25 13:36 |
| #2 Cockpit voice recorder... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdAgu38K0Mo I dunno. It's not like the guy rolled out the rug and started banging his head on the floor. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2009-03-25 12:18 |
| #1 Good sentences. |
| Posted by: Galactic Coordinator Omavising9607 2009-03-25 12:14 |