Airline welcomes announcement of further inquiry

Aer Lingus has welcomed the establishment of a further inquiry into the Tuskar Rock air disaster.

A spokesman for the company said it hoped this inquiry, to be carried out by two international air-crash investigators, "would bring us closer to establishing the probable cause of the accident."

Aer Lingus would do all it could to help the investigators, Mr Yves Le Mercier from France and Mr Colin Torkington from Australia, he said.

As far as the company was concerned it had carried out trawls for all relevant documents, as exhaustively as it could. It had also invited relatives of the victims to examine the documents, the spokesman said.

The review process found that Aer Lingus paperwork relating to a routine maintenance inspection carried out on the aircraft in December 1967 was found to be missing the following year.

Mr Dan Loughrey, Director of Group Corporate Affairs at Aer Lingus, said that while yesterday's review did not indicate the probable cause of the crash, a new independent study was necessary "in order to assess the full implications of the new material".

The company had always taken the view that "the final closure on this tragic incident could only take place for the relatives and the airline if the cause of the accident could be established", he said.

"Everyone associated with this tragedy has endured pain beyond the normal and, in the light of the new issues brought to the fore through this review, it is imperative that every effort is made to establish the facts through this independent study," he said.

The full text of the Tuskar air crash report is available on The Irish Times website at www.ireland.com