‘Faint Noise’ Recorded on Doomed Jet : Crew Conversation Yields Nothing; No Sign of Sabotage

Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the Pan American World Airways jumbo jet that crashed in southwest Scotland revealed what a Transport Ministry spokesman described Friday as “a faint, unexplained noise” at the end of the tape.

Other than that, said spokesman Paul McKie, “there were no abnormal noises on the tapes until the signals ended abruptly.

“There is nothing in the conversations (of the flight crew) to indicate anything was wrong,” he said, adding that the noise “needs a bit more analysis.”

But, he cautioned, “It would be quite wrong to jump to any conclusions.”

Widespread Speculation

The fact that New York-bound Flight 103 crashed without apparent warning Wednesday evening, coupled with news that Washington had alerted airlines, embassies and friendly governments two weeks earlier about a specific bomb threat to Pan Am, has generated widespread speculation that the Boeing 747 was sabotaged.

Mick Charles, head of the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch team probing the crash, said Friday that there is “no evidence whatsoever, yet, of sabotage.”

And the U.S. Embassy here issued a statement saying that, “Based upon all available information, the American Embassy in London has no reason to believe that the risks involved in air travel are greater now than in the past.”

In West Germany, however, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt, where the flight originated aboard a smaller Boeing 727, said the Federal Criminal Office had been brought into the disaster inquiry. That department investigates political and security-related crimes.

“Reports that a passenger booked from Frankfurt through to New York might have been carrying a bomb in baggage cannot be absolutely ruled out at present,” said spokesman Hubert Harth. “It cannot be ruled out that the incident had its beginning here.”

An alternate crash theory is that the plane suffered a massive, mid-air structural failure, and investigators are still analyzing the contents of the flight data recorder, which stored various technical details about the aircraft’s performance.

All 258 passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am jumbo jet, and as many as 22 people on the ground, died when the aircraft suddenly broke apart less than an hour after takeoff from London’s Heathrow Airport, raining fiery wreckage over the tiny Scottish village of Lockerbie as it plummeted to earth.

The grim search for physical clues as well as for victims of the air disaster continued in the village Friday, with about 600 police officers, soldiers and rescue specialists combing through the rubble and the surrounding countryside with the help of dogs.

Searchers moved shoulder to shoulder across fields and marshes, trying to collect every scrap of evidence. Charles, of the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, said the spread of debris over many miles was “not unusual,” since the plane was 6 miles high and winds were 115 knots, or about 132 m.p.h. “In these circumstances, a lot of the debris is going to be sent a very long distance.”

Search teams have found more than 150 bodies so far, but the others are still unaccounted for. Crash investigators removed the corpses of the cockpit crew Friday after leaving them in place up to that point as an aid in determining what happened.

Nose Remained Intact

The nose of the aircraft remained remarkably intact after landing in a field several miles from where most of the rest of the wreckage came to rest. Investigators hope it might hold the key to finding the cause of the crash.

At least 17 townspeople are still missing and believed buried where half a dozen houses once stood. The only thing left there now is a huge, debris-strewn gouge in the earth marking the spot where the main section of Flight 103 smashed into the ground.

Police say they also still have no information about the occupants of five motor vehicles now reduced to burned-out shells around the rim of the destruction.

At a makeshift mortuary set up in the town hall, two dental experts worked with pathologists to identify the bodies.

Thirty relatives of the victims arrived in Lockerbie Friday evening from the United States despite efforts by local officials to discourage them from coming on “humanitarian grounds.”

“If at all possible, relatives should not approach Lockerbie,” police superintendent Angus Kennedy said earlier Friday. “But if the relatives find comfort to come along, we will do all possible.” Social workers were also on hand to comfort the bereaved.

Sufficient Precautions

Meanwhile, it was acknowledged here Friday that the country’s Transport Ministry decided not to alert either travelers or London’s main, Heathrow Airport that it knew of the specific, pre-Christmas bomb threat against Pan Am. Ministry officials said they were convinced that special security precautions already in force for U.S. airlines were sufficient.

The admission sparked an immediate political controversy even as Transport Minister Paul Channon said he had ordered a review of security procedures at all the country’s airports. It also underlined the inherent unpredictability of a system which requires that individuals at several stages in an international security chain make their own judgments as to whether notice of any specific threat is worthy of being passed along.

A spokesman for Heathrow, from which the second, London-New York leg of Flight 103 took off less than 48 hours earlier, insisted Friday that security officials there “did not receive any notification of a reported threat against a Pan Am aircraft.”

Officials at the airport in Frankfurt said a special security alert had been in force after the notice was received.

Frequent Alerts

Speaking in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview before leaving with his family on a vacation in the Caribbean, Channon acknowledged that his ministry was informed by the Americans about the Pan Am threat, but said that similar alerts come up frequently.

Channon said he had “no reason to believe there was any security lapse at Heathrow.” He nevertheless ordered a review of security “at all our airports” as a precaution.

“They (the security procedures) are among the best in the world. I want to make sure that continues,” the minister said. “If improvements can be made, we won’t hesitate to make them.”

“The problem is, of course, that one receives so many warnings and bits of information,” added Channon’s second-in-command, Minister of State for Transport Michael Portillo. “If we communicated all of them all of the time, they would begin to have almost no impact because they come through at such a fast rate.”

In this case, Portillo said, “we looked very carefully at the procedures that we had in place for American airline flights. Those procedures are greater than for some other flights, and that was regarded as being appropriate.”

“Who was notified and when is not really of consequence if the appropriate security measures were taken,” added a ministry spokesman.

Charges of ‘Insensitivity’

However, the opposition Labor Party’s Transport spokesman, John Prescott, accused Channon of “insensitivity” for taking off on vacation Friday and “dereliction of duty” for failing to alert the public to the special threat.

Noting that a circular describing the threat had been posted on the U. S. Embassy bulletin board in Moscow about 10 days ago, Prescott commented, “I would have thought that was the least amount of information that should have been given to the British public.”

Prescott was even more upset that Channon had failed to inform Parliament about the Pan Am bomb threat when he first addressed the legislature Thursday about the crash.

“I mean, that is a pretty cardinal piece of information,” the Laborite said angrily. “He has withheld important information about a threat to an airline. Is he still making those judgments?”

Based on Telephone Tip

The American “security bulletin” which first outlined the bomb threat was dated Dec. 9 and based on an anonymous warning telephoned to the U.S. embassy in Helsinki four days earlier.

Among other steps, it ordered that the information be relayed by the Federal Aviation Administration to all U.S. airlines operating in Europe. It added, however, that the carriers should be warned against further disseminating the information “without the official approval of the director of civil aviation security.”

Another group that limited its circulation of the warning was the International Air Transport Assn., which represents airlines.

“We were able to pass it along to airlines that we thought would be concerned by it,” said IATA information director David Kyd in a telephone interview. “It is not our responsibility to inform governments or to inform individual airports. . . . Governments have to decide whether a given warning, a given threat, a rumor--whether that needs to be taken seriously and to what level it need be distributed.”

Kyd agreed that the existing system of disseminating information about security threats requires decisions at many levels about how seriously to take the danger. “It’s not a responsibility that’s easy to live with,” he commented.

Times staff writer Rone Tempest, in Lockerbie, contributed to this story.