The design of Linate's runways may have contributed to the crash.

This from AFP:

Milan state prosecutor Gerardo D'Ambrosio said he had reached the conclusion after listening to recordings of conversations between the German pilot and the control tower at Linate.

"It's true that there was human error. The pilot of the Cessna took a wrong turn, convinced he was on the right runway. But we have to investigate further to see all the other factors which may have influenced the accident," said D'Ambrosio.

D'Ambrosio said the recording suggested the Cessna pilot believed he was on a runway called Romeo Five, when in fact he was on Romeo Six, which took his plane into the path of the Scandinavian Airlines jet as it approached take-off speed.

Italy's airline pilots' association, Anpac, pointed to the airport authority's failure to relocate the intersecting runway as a contributory cause of the crash.

But even given the manifest human error, security at the airport has come in for criticism in the wake of the crash.

Critics point to the intersection of the two runways at a critical point, half way along the take-off runway, when a departing plane is approaching full ground speed.

Anpac has complained of the danger on several occasions of the intersecting runway, normally used by small private aircraft to reach the area of the airport allocated to them.

"We have issued a pile of documents over the last few years demanding the closure of the intersection and the construction of a parallel runway," said Anpac spokesman Menico Snider.

The real error was "to ignore a foreseeable source of accidents" when the particular intersection had been the cause of at least one, minor, accident in the past, according to Snider.


[This message has been edited by Austman (edited 10-10-2001).]