The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said on Monday that the final report into the circumstances surrounding the air crash that killed former South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje and two pilots will be released in February.
”The accident investigator received an external report just a week ago from the United States with regards the flux detector, and we are in the process of doing analysis,” said KC Marobela, the CAA’s manager of legal services, who spoke on behalf of the communications section.
Marobela said the outstanding report has been received from the component’s manufacturers, and will be incorporated into the final report, which will be released for public consumption at the ”end of January, early February”.
The flux detector is a component found in the tip of an aircraft’s wing. It picks up the magnetic field of the Earth, acting like a magnetic compass and interpreting electrical signals into the instrumentation of the aircraft.
In August this year, the lead investigator said that in terms of the instrumentation, the flux detector could be considered the ”last piece of the puzzle”.
The investigator was subsequently banned from speaking to the media as part of an internal CAA shake-up, following a speculative article in a British newspaper. The article quoted an unnamed source claiming Cronje was, in fact, murdered to prevent him shedding more light on to the match-fixing scandal that prematurely ended his cricketing career.
”It is a complex investigation. We’ve already worked through the flight recorder and cockpit recorder — commonly known as the black boxes — as well as documentation relating to the pilots, such as licensing and medicals,” said Andre de Kock in August.
Former Proteas captain Cronje and the two pilots, Willie Meyer and Ian Noakes, died in June 2002 when their Hawker Siddeley 748 twin-engined turbo propeller aircraft crashed into the Outeniqua mountains near George in the Southern Cape.
Cronje was one of the country’s foremost cricket players before he fell from grace in 2000 when his involvement in an international betting scandal came to light. — Sapa