The pilots of a US cargo plane that crashed in Dubai were told they could land in Doha after a fire warning but decided to return to Dubai instead, the civil aviation authorities said on Tuesday.
"The initial analysis of the downloaded data (from the plane's recorders) indicated that there was a fire warning followed by smoke in the cockpit, as reported by the crew about 28 minutes (after) takeoff," said a statement from the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA).
"The crew were offered by Bahrain Air Traffic Control to land at Doha, but they decided to return... to Dubai, then they experienced cockpit visibility" and communications problems, the statement said.
The cockpit voice recorder and the digital flight data recorder from the United Parcel Service (UPS) cargo plane "were shipped to the US National Transportation Safety Board on Friday”, the GCAA statement said.
The data is "still under thorough technical analysis," it added.
Both the pilot and co-pilot of the Boeing 747-400 plane were killed when it crashed at a military base on the outskirts of Dubai on September 3. There have been no reports of casualties on the ground.
Soon after takeoff, the pilots reported smoke in the cockpit and difficulty in maintaining altitude, and attempted to fly back to Dubai Airport to land, a previous GCAA statement said.
But the aircraft's approach was too high, and it flew over the airport and made a right turn before quickly shedding altitude and losing radar contact, less than an hour after takeoff, the GCAA said.
The crash is being investigated by a team of 20 experts from the GCAA, the US National Transportation Safety Board, the US Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing and UPS.
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