Special Hearings — Helderberg Flight Special Hearing — 1998-06-01

DAVID JOSEPH KLATZOW: (still under oath)
 Thank you, Mr Commissioner.   Now, I had reached the portion by saying to you that everything that we have dealt with to date points to an untoward incident having occurred aboard the Helderberg.   It points to an untoward incident having occurred at an early stage of the Helderberg's flight, and more importantly it points inexorably in the direction of a major cover-up on the part of the commission or at best stunning incompetency on their behalf.
 Let us look at the possible causes of this crash, and let me put to you a scenario which will fit, in my view, with respect, the facts as I've outlined them to you.  In the late period of 1988 and '87, it will be remembered that the closing stages of the so-called war in Angola were being fought.   South African troops were deep into Angola, despite official denials, and the South African military and air force were engaged in hotly contending that country's existence with East Bloc operatives who were working with the Angolans at the time.   
 If you remember, it was a time when South African Airforce had lost, and had been forced to reluctantly concede that they had lost a number of mirage fighters to the new Mig aircraft which were making their appearance in growing numbers.   It seems to be that there was a problem at the time with either the air to air or the surface to air missiles and that South Africa was having some difficulty in dealing with these problems.   
 You must also remember that Armscor, far from being the innovative giant that it claimed to have been, were on the level of petty criminals when it came to stealing intellectual property.   If you look at the Armscor weaponry, much vaunted as it is, much of the sophistication and innovation is purloined from anybody who could be parted from it.   Even the modern rifle which supplies the South African Defence Force, the R4, has its origins in the humble AK47, albeit with the Israeli intervention in between of the Galil(?) weapon.    We know that Armscor would not scruple to beg, borrow, steal if necessary, any technology which it deemed necessary to the continuation of their holy war.
 We believe that there was a necessity to develop better rocket propellants at the time.   Now a rocket propellant is not just something that you can walk down to the local 7-11 and buy.   The basic ingredients are well-known, but the added ingredients, the subtle ingredients which give it its extra performance, need to be either developed at great time and cost, or they need to be obtained another way.   Those subtle ingredients which are added to the rocket fuel, the major component of which is ammonium perchlorate, are very important, and once one has a rocket fuel which works, it is a matter of chemical simplicity, relatively speaking, to analyse that rocket fuel and determine the constituents which give it its added zip.
 We believe, those who have investigated this crash, who are not involved with the government of the day, believe that South Africa was importing, and had been importing for some time, military ordnance of this nature aboard passenger aircraft.   We believe that it is the ammonium perchlorate that was being brought in, either to be used, but more likely to be copied, that spontaneously ignited that night and created the problem.   It fits the bill inasmuch as it contains its own oxygen, it is supremely unstable and it is quite unfit to be transported aboard an aircraft, let alone a civilian aircraft carrying innocent passengers.
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 ...believe that Southeard pointed to this fact and that Margo ignored it.   
 We believe that the reason that Uys did not land was because he was told not to land by senior officials of either the government or the airline.   
 We believe that he had thought that he had extinguished that fire, only to be reconfronted with it outside Mauritius, by which time his ability to fight it was impaired and the structural integrity of the aircraft was impaired to such an extent that the aircraft disappeared into the ocean.   
 We believe that that conversation asking for permission to land and being refused permission to land was recorded at ZUR and that that is why the tape went missing, not that it was inexplicably overtaped, which it wasn't, for reasons that I've outlined to you, or mislaid, for the same reasons that I've outlined to you.   
 We believe that the clue to this lies in the conversation about dinner, which Margo was at pains to exclude from his inquiry.
 We believe that the airline knew all along what it was transporting, and were complicent in a cover-up of major proportions.
 We believe that Armscor knows about this, and I believe that it is no coincidence that Mr John Hare, a senior man at Armscor, is now the deputy chief executive officer of South African Airways.
 We believe that these versions that I've put to you are not far-fetched, we believe they're founded in fact, and part of the fact is the failure to adequately explore these versions of the Margo Commission.    The failure of Margo to call Moutons and his engineers, and the intimidation by Margo and his investigators of this group of people is grotesque.   His unwillingness to include a proper investi-gation into the nature of the material aboard is strange, to say the least. 
 The pieces of information relating to the missing ZUR tape all point to the fact that it was deliberately removed from ZUR that night and disappeared from a locked safe, after being placed in the hands of senior SAA officials.
 The performance of the Department of Civil Aviation in this inquiry, and you will hear in the Machel inquiry as well, was, at the very best for them, dismal, and probably they were involved in the complicity.
 The involvement of various key South African personnel in both the original disaster and in the subsequent inquiry was manipulated in such a way as to prevent them from ever being able to tell the truth.
 The statement of Jimmy Mitten needs to be taken seriously.   His analysis is not that of an amateur, he is a professional member of the cockpit crew and has been for many, many years.    His interpretation of what went on in that cockpit must be taken seriously.   
 The failure of the Airline Pilots Association to make public their findings, which have been confirmed to me by numerous pilots, must be investigated.
 The role played by Theunis Jakobs, who as recently as a few years ago made a comment that he had taken files from the Taipei station which could materially affect the outcome of the inquiry, this was made to a man whose name I will give you, who is a photographer and who will be prepared to say what I have just told you under oath, his name is Marais Wessels, he works for a company called Vision by Light, and he made a statement to me last week to the effect that:-
"I spoke to Jakobs because he and I were good friends.   I saw him after the Helderberg.   He told me that he had material, and I would say this under oath."
 He also told me that he was at Singapore doing a film shoot for SAA when a senior member of the SAA staff spoke to Mike van Rensburg, who was the cargo agent in Singapore and quote, "Said that the Armscor containers appeared to be going okay.   They were being shipped out under the title of hairdryers".   Now it could be that Armscor have got a major problem in curling their hair, I think it unlikely.   I think that the practice of shipping illegal Armscor material aboard SAA passenger airliners has continued until recently.
 I think that, in my view, the Margo inquiry was such a travesty of anything that an inquiry ought to be that it needs to be re-opened, with people who seriously wish to get at the truth and who do not wish to allow the embarrassment of the government or the parastatals to stand in their way.  These are the people who should conduct the next inquiry, and I think that Mr Maharaj needs to be urged with every fibre that you can summon to re-open the investigation and to launch a proper judicial inquiry to establish the truth of what went on that night in the Helderberg.
 And I would like to close my submission to you by just drawing you a diagram which you will be able to use to understand the inter-relationship of two things, the cockpit voice recorder and the air traffic control recording made at Plaisance, together with the ZUR tape.   So let me do that and if you want to, you can make a note of the drawing that I give you.
 The aircraft took off at Taipei, it reached a cruising altitude and it flew on.   Somewhere outside Mauritius, instead of the proper descent into Mauritius, it plunged precipitously into the ocean.   Just before it went into the ocean, a conversation was had with air traffic control outside Mauritius.   That conversation is available.   The last 20 minutes or 30 minutes of the cockpit voice recorder should have recorded that, because the air traffic control tape starts off by saying, "This is Springbok 265, we have a smoke problem".   That's the beginning, we would have believed, of the problem.   Now if the cockpit voice recorder was still working, which it should have been after the smoke problem, because it went out thereafter, we should have a part of that conversation on the CVR.   There is none, there is not a word of that Plaisance conversation on the CVR.   What we do have is a cockpit voice recorder involving a conversation about dinner.   Dinner would have been served somewhere along there, which means that if the cockpit voice recorder involved dinner, the cockpit voice recorder was operating here and ceased to function at that point.   We believe that somewhere round about here, the new ZUR tape would have come in, and that would have involved the conversation between Uys and ZUR.