Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 2, 2002

UEBERLINGEN, Germany, — A chartered Russian airliner had a 50-second warning to change altitude before it slammed into a cargo plane over southern Germany, killing 71 people, including 52 children headed for a beach vacation in Spain, officials said Tuesday. Swiss air traffic control, which was in charge of the flight paths of both planes, initially said it had given the Tupolev-154 roughly two minutes advance notice and that the pilot did not begin descending to avoid the cargo jet until a third request.

THE SWISS revised their account after the German government agency for air accident investigations said the Russian pilot was given only about 50 seconds warning to change altitude and reacted after a second notice.

The German account of the incident said the Russian pilot changed course about 25 seconds before the collision 36,000 feet over Lake Constance.

Anton Maag, chief of the control tower at Zurich, said the warning, while only about a minute before the crash, “wasn’t irresponsible, but fairly tight.”

It was Maag who initially said the warning was given two minutes before the crash and that the Russian pilot only reacted after a third was issued.

AN ORDER TO DESCEND
At the same time the Russian jet began moving lower, the cargo plane’s automatic collision warning system issued an order to descend, and pilots are obliged to follow these instructions, Maag said.

The director of Bashkirian Airlines, Nikolai Odegov, said Swiss air traffic controllers were to blame for the accident, the Interfax news agency reported Tuesday evening.

“My theory is that it is the fault of the air traffic controllers. They put the planes on the same path,” Odegov said. “There were no reasons to say that the pilots didn’t handle the plane properly.”

By Tuesday afternoon, investigators had recovered 26 bodies — some still strapped into seats — and had located the flight data recorder from the Tu-154. Twenty-two boats patrolled Lake Constance looking for flotsam or telltale jet fuel slicks. Investigators said they located both planes’ flight data recorders and the cockpit voice recorder of the cargo jet.

Wreckage and baggage was found at 57 sites, including corn and wheat fields, roadsides and next to houses, said Erwin Hedger, police chief of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
Authorities said nobody on the ground was harmed.

The region is on Germany’s border with Switzerland and Austria, about 135 miles south of Frankfurt.

THREE DAYS OF MOURNING
The Tu-154 was carrying a group of children and teen-agers from Bashkorstotan, a Russian republic in the southern Ural Mountains.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were set aside for mourning in Bashkortostan.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to the relatives of the victims, and dispatched investigators and the Russian general consul in the Germany city of Bonn to the crash scene.

Russian officials and the tour agency that helped organize the trip said eight of the children were younger than 12. Forty-four were between 12 and 16.

At Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, Bashkirian representative Sergei Rybanov said 52 children, five adults and 12 crew were aboard the Russian plane. All flew into Moscow’s Sheretmeyevo airport on Saturday, but when they missed their connection requested that the airline organize a special flight to Barcelona.

Axel Gietz, head of DHL corporate affairs in Brussels, said both people aboard the cargo jet, the British pilot, Paul Phillips, and his Canadian co-pilot, Brant Campioni, were killed.

Another DHL spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said its aircraft was built in 1990 and purchased by his company in 1996 from British Airways, which had also used it to transport freight. It was equipped with a traffic collision avoidance system and had been subject to regular inspections and maintenance like all the company’s planes, he said.

The three-engine Tu-154, first put into commercial service in 1972, is the workhorse of Russia’s domestic airlines and widely used throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as in China.

THUNDER IN THE SKY
Witnesses said they heard a noise like thunder and saw a fireball erupt in the night sky, then saw large and small pieces of wreckage falling to the ground and into Lake Constance.

Dirk Diestel, 47, was changing his child’s diaper shortly before midnight when he looked up through a skylight and saw a huge fireball in the sky. “Immediately I thought that something horrible had happened,” he said.

This three-engine aircraft was first put into commercial service in 1972. It is widely used in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union.

Two turbofan engines are located on either side of rear fuselage, and third is in the extreme rear fuselage with an intake at the base of the fin.

Crew of three; two pilots and flight engineer, with provisions for navigator and five cabin staff. Two passenger cabins, separated by service compartments; alternative configurations for 166 tourist-class passengers or for 134 tourist and 12 first-class passengers.

Wingspan: 123 feet
Length: 157 feet
Fuselage diameter:12.5 feet
Max. payload: 39,680 lb
Controls: Conventional and power-operated
Max. Altitude: 39,000 feet
Range (w/ max payload): 2,299 miles
Cruising speed: 581 mph

Recent crashes involving the TU-154
Date Location Deaths
2001 Black Sea est. 77
2001 Irkutsk, Russia 145
1999 China 61
1998 Namibia 33
1997 United Arab Emirates 86
1996 Norway 141
1994 Irkutsk, Russia 124
Sources: Jane's All the World's Aircraft, The Associated Press

By NBC’s Judy Augsburger in Moscow, Andy Eckardt in Ueberlingen, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/774998.asp