Posted on 07/02/2002 5:14:17 AM PDT by kattracks
London (CNSNews.com) - The pilot of a Russian passenger jet failed to immediately respond to air traffic control instructions, resulting in a mid-air collision over southern Germany that killed at least 70 people, officials said Tuesday.
Most of the dead were children and teenagers traveling to Spain. Their flight collided with a Boeing 757 cargo plane owned by DHL Worldwide Express late Monday.
More than 40 children were traveling from their homes in the southern Ural mountains to a United Nations-sponsored festival in Barcelona. The BBC reported the party had flown into Moscow over the weekend but missed their connecting flight to Spain. The airline then agreed to charter a special flight for the children.
DHL's British press office said the cargo plane was flying from Bahrain to Belgium and had made a stopover in Bergamo, Italy, shortly before the fatal collision.
The company said the two pilots, U.K. citizen Paul Phillips and Brant Campioni, a Canadian, were the only people on board the cargo plane. Both were killed.
DHL and transport officials said that after the Russian pilot initially ignored requests to descend to a lower altitude, the cargo plane pilot received a warning via the Boeing's collision avoidance system. Both planes went into emergency dives, resulting in the fatal crash.
The crash happened shortly after German air traffic controllers handed both flights over to their Swiss counterparts.
"The problem was that the Russian plane did not respond immediately," Anton Maag, a spokesman for Swiss air traffic control, told reporters. "The descent was begun very late. The double descent led to both planes flying at the same altitude and hitting each other."
One witness, Klaus-Dieter Schindler, told Reuters: "I was lying in my bed, saw a ball of fire in the sky and ran out onto the balcony. Behind the forest it looked like a firework display was going off. In the glow of the fire I saw wreckage falling out of the sky."
German and Russian officials gave differing accounts of the number aboard the passenger plane, reports said. An official at Moscow's Domodedovo airport listed 12 crew and 57 passengers on board the flight, for a death toll of 71 including the cargo plane pilots.
German officials, meanwhile, said more than 80 may have been on board the Russian plane.
The passenger aircraft, a Tupolev Tu-154, was operated by Bashkirian Airlines, one of hundreds of companies to come out of the breakup of Soviet national carrier Aeroflot. The airline is based in Ufa, capital of the southern Russian Federation republic of Bashkortostan.
The Tupolev's black box flight recorder was recovered early Tuesday and will be analyzed by German officials.
Debris was spread over a wide area in the town of Ueberlingen near the German-Swiss border, but no casualties were reported on the ground.
The Tu-154 is widely used in Russia despite safety concerns. Last July, one of the planes crashed in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, killing 143 people. A crash in the same city in 1994 killed 125.
According to the Aviation Safety Network, Tu-154 planes have been involved in seven fatal crashes in the past five years.
E-mail a news tip to Mike Wendling.
Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.
I suspected as much; if both planes do the SAME thing to avoid a collision, well, they're still going to hit each other.
Our UN dues hard at work.
tony
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.