Posted on 07/01/2002 8:42:58 PM PDT by Squawk 8888
UBERLINGEN, Germany (AP) -- A Russian passenger jet with dozens of people aboard and a two-pilot cargo plane collided late Monday over southern Germany in a fireball that scattered flaming wreckage over a wide area. All those on board both aircraft were believed killed.
A Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 from Moscow bound for Barcelona, and the Boeing 757 cargo plane were believed to have been flying at an altitude of about 10,970 metres when they hit, said Wolfgang Wenzel, a police spokesman in the city of Tuebingen.
"At such an altitude, it would be a wonder if anyone survived," he said.
Uta Otterbein, a spokeswoman for German Air Traffic Control, said the Tu-154 had 80 passengers and 13 crew aboard. But Wenzel said the German Embassy in Moscow had reported only 57 passengers and 12 crew. German police earlier said up to 150 were killed, basing the assessment on the number of passengers they thought were on board.
Two pilots were on board the cargo plane, Otterbein said. Another air controller said the plane was flying for the DHL delivery service on a trip from Bahrain to Brussels.
Rescue workers began recovering bodies of some of the victims after the two planes collided at 11:43 p.m., Wenzel said.
Dozens of people called police stations in the area saying they saw a large ball of fire in the sky at the time of the crash, Wenzel said.
At least one building was reported on fire, but there were no immediate reports of casualties on the ground. Hundreds of rescuers worked through the night locating wreckage and bodies, while helicopters flew overhead looking for burning or other visible parts of the planes.
In Moscow, a duty officer with Russian Emergency Situations Ministry confirmed that Bashkirian Airlines flight BTS2937 had departed from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport bound for Barcelona with a stopover in Munich.
It was not immediately clear how the two aircraft came to collide.
The planes came down near Uberlingen on the northern shore of Lake Constance, which borders Switzerland and Austria. Burning wreckage was found 30 kilometres from the crash site, some 215 kilometres south of Frankfurt.
There was no immediate comment from Swiss air traffic controllers, who had responsibility for the planes at the time of the crash.
The Russian plane was a charter flight, said a duty officer for Bashkirian Airlines at its headquarters in Ufa, the capital of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan in the southern Ural Mountains.
The airline has eight Tu-154s in its fleet of 39 Soviet-designed planes. It mainly serves Russia and former Soviet republics, with some charter flights to other destinations.
The three-engine Tupolev 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.
A Tu-154 crashed in the Siberian city of Irkutsk last July, killing all 143 aboard. Another crashed on takeoff from Irkutsk in 1994, killing 124 people. The plane reportedly was overloaded.
A Tu-154 belonging to China Southwest Airlines crashed in China in 1999, killing all 61 people aboard. A German-owned Tu-154 collided with a U.S. Air Force C-141 off the coast of Namibia in 1998, killing 33 people, and in 1997 a Tajik Tu-154 crashed en route to the United Arab Emirates, killing 85.
Collisions in the air between large aircraft are extremely rare, especially at the high cruising altitudes where Monday's crash reportedly occurred.
Most aircraft carry transponders, devices that relay a plane's identification, altitude and speed to ground controllers. Controllers use this information to track aircraft and keep them a safe distance from each other. In addition, equipment on many aircraft can read the transponder signals of nearby planes, painting an electronic map to show pilots the aircraft around them.
Many planes also carry collision avoidance equipment that can automatically pull the plane away from an impending collision, or sound an alarm and tell the pilot which way to turn to avoid a crash.
Transponders must be regularly calibrated and checked to make sure they are functioning properly.
How on earth could this have happened? It's not like these were small planes. The instruments would have had to fail on BOTH planes to allow something like this.
Where the hell is Bashkiria?
10,970 meters = 35,990 feet. That is a high altitude for a collision.
Then hours more to determine how many people were onboard?
Screw security, I wat a database that's realtime.
As my father used to say, " THIS AIN'T THE TOUGHEST HORSE TO TAME."
Good question. It's sounding more and more like an accident.
If you go and look at the aviation accident databases, you'll find that every crash has an unusual aspect to it, whether it involves a single aircraft or multiple aircraft. There are civil aviation accidents in every decade, from the forties on up to now, where you can put some sort of spin on it to make it sound/look like a terrorist attack.
Since there are no survivors your suspicions will more then likely never be solved and this will go on official record as a mere accident. I am not saying that it wasn't an accident. I am just saying that we will more then likely never know for sure.
Was the Cargo pilot from Bahrain an Arab? Could he have been on a mission for Allah? These things will never be discussed – they could spook a LOT of air passengers. The knowledge that the terrorists do not have to hijack YOUR plane - they can kill you with another plane – will immediately obsolete all these stupid baggage searches at US airports.
I would think that an intentional collision would be close to impossible. The closure rate, assuming a head-on approach, would be on the order of 1800 feet/sec (1/3 mile/sec), so you would have only a few seconds to find your target, adjust your heading and altitude, and pray your worthless prayers to allah. If you missed, the target would be miles ahead of you by the time you turned around, and catching up would be nearly impossible.
I would also think that, if you were a terrorist and had control of an airplane, you would try to hit a more important target that just a random aircraft.
If this were the case, the radar tapes would show the maneuvering the ramming aircraft did.
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