WARSAW — The nearly disastrous plunge of the Serbian president’s plane last Friday was the fault of a copilot who spilled coffee in the cockpit and accidentally activated an emergency switch, the Serbian Civil Aviation Directorate said in a report Tuesday.
Initially, Serbian officials said the aircraft, carrying President Tomislav Niko-lic and nine others to a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican, had been sent into a plunge over the Adriatic after one of its three engines failed at an altitude of about 33,000 feet.
But an investigation by the directorate found that the dive occurred after the copilot, Bojan Zoric, “spilled coffee on the instrument panel” and “accidentally activated the emergency slot extension” as he was trying to clean it up.
This led to a brief shutdown of the third engine, the report said. After about a minute, in which the plane fell about a mile, the captain regained control and the aircraft returned to Belgrade. Nikolic had to postpone his meeting with the pope.
“These 60 seconds felt like an eternity,” said Stanislava Pak, a presidential adviser who was on the plane. “We were falling like a rock. Our things were flying all over the cabin. I fell on my colleague, and then grabbed his hand. It was the most terrifying moment.”
Serbian authorities said the copilot was suspended from duty for “endangering flight safety.”
It was not the first time that a coffee spill had endangered plane passengers. In 2011, a cup that spilled in the cockpit, possibly because of turbulence, briefly created communication and navigation problems for a Boeing 777 bound for Frankfurt