IT DID NOT take the media and the politicians very long to initiate the obligatory blame-game and rumour-mongering regarding the crash of the National Guard plane in Kolossi, in which two Guard officers were killed. Within hours of the crash of the C-9 Pilatus plane, there was talk about a text message, sent by the co-pilot to his girlfriend, whom he was, supposedly, scheduled to get engaged to, the next day. It was also reported that the aerobatics, shortly before the C-9 scraped the bell-tower of the church and fell, were being done to impress the girlfriend.
These rumours, inexorably, led to the conclusion that crash was the result of human error and a blatant breach of army discipline. It did not matter that most of the above-mentioned information was completely wrong or at best, not proven. All that could be said with any degree of certainty was that the plane had left its authorized flight path and should not have been anywhere near Kolossi. Why had had it left its flight path, why was it flying so low, were the aerobatics intentional are all questions that even the experts investigating the crash will have difficulty answering conclusively.
Yet the self-styled experts of the media, with help from the politicians – as in the case of the Helios crash – needed no time to provide all the answers. Whereas in the case of the Helios Boeing, all initially blamed the crash on the company, for allegedly, not maintaining the plane properly, in the case of the C-9, they decided that crash was the result of human error. There was no possibility that the National Guard’s engineers might not have done their maintenance work properly, according to the experts of the media.
Yet the verdict of the newspapers and the politicians yesterday was that there was a complete lack of discipline within the National Guard. It was in ‘disarray’ claimed Simerini, citing also the explosion of a mortar shell during training in July and an episode in a recruitment camp last February. One Diko deputy, went as far as to attribute the lack of discipline to the Annan plan, which, envisaged the abolition of the National Guard! As a result, he argued, officers no longer took their jobs seriously and discipline had suffered – why else would the C-9 have left its flight path and engaged in aerobatics? But is it not possible that planes were not properly maintain and serviced as a result of this lack of discipline?
The truth is that nobody could safely say why the plane fell and we will have to wait for the findings of the investigation by people who are much better-qualified than journalists and politicians to establish the causes. Not that this will stop the self-proclaimed experts from uttering theories based on nothing more than gossip.
