Aircraft collide over Germany

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FRANKFURT, Germany (July 1) - A Russian-made airliner and a Boeing cargo plane collided over southern Germany late Monday and at least two people were believed killed, officials said.

The Tupolev 154 and the Boeing 757 crashed into one another at 11:43 p.m. over the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said Wolfgang Wenzel, a state police spokesman in Tuebingen.

Wenzel said the Boeing was a carrying freight with just a two-member crew. He said both pilots were believed killed.

An air traffic controller from the airport in Frankfurt, who declined to be named, said the Tupolev was a passenger plane. It was not immediately clear how many people were on board that plane, which can carry up to 164 passengers.

The air controller also identified the Boeing as flying for packaged delivery service, DHL.

Burning wreckage was scattered for several miles near Ueberlingen, 135 miles south of Frankfurt and just north of Lake Constance, Wenzel said.

Dozens of people flooded police stations in the area with calls describing seeing a large ball of fire in the sky at the time of the crash, Wenzel said.

AP-NY-07-01-02 2011EDT

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

Looks bad! Thank god the 757 was not another air liner full of people. But one has to feel sorry for the ones (95-100 of them) on the Tu-154. :( Another bad day for aviation.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

God rest their Weary souls, Amen.

Live hard, play hard, die happy!

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 02-07-02 AT 06:18 AM (GMT)]Tragic news,my thoughts go out to the families of those who have died.
The airlines involved were a DHL 757 enroute from Bahrain to Brussels,it had a British pilot onboard. The other a Bishke.. Airlines TU-154 enroute from Moscow to Barcelona.
Very lucky that any wreckage did not hit the surrounding towns.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

I've been saying for so long that this was going to happen sooner or later. Its very sad.

Regards

Ben

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

It's always a tragedy if someone dies in aviation or anywhere else for that matter. My thought goes to all the family on board of the two a/c.

The air traffic controller did command the Tu twice to change altitude but he didn't react to it. So in the plenary report the Tu was at fold. Probably the Russian crew misunderstood the air traffic control. Very said but these things happen.
Derby from the mid air coalition was found in a 32 km radius and said to put some houses on fire, nobody on the ground was hurt though.
Wasn't there an incident a few years back of an other coalition between two airlines in the skies above India?

regards,

Jeroen

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

An other tragedy unfortunately.
I have seen a document on a French channel once about ATC in Russia.
None of the controllers were able to understand nor answer a very basic question in English!!!!

I'm afraid that the Russian pilots might have some trouble to speak and understand properly english on the radio. When I fly UA , you can connect and listen to the traffic between the cockpit and ATC . It's not that easy to understand for a non native due to the radio distorsion.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 02-07-02 AT 09:02 AM (GMT)]>I've been saying for so long that this was going to happen
>sooner or later. Its very sad.

Ben,

It shouldn't though. The Swiss ATC told the Tu-154 twice to alter altitude but didn't respond, and what happened to the collision warning system that the 757 should have had? There seem to be doubts about whether or not the TUPOLEV had this system fitted. Something sounds fishy...

Regards, Glenn.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 02-07-02 AT 08:47 AM (GMT)]a) The Russian Airliner was not responding to ATC and wouldnt drop altitude. Since he then didnt tell the DHL757 to drop I would say it is ATC error as he must have failed to spot the 757 until it was Red blips and by that stage it could have been too late.

b) How safe is the Tu-154? (from BBC)

By Paul Duffy Russian Editor, Air Transport World
The Tupolev-154, the plane involved in a mid-air collision over southern Germany, is a model with a chequered safety record.

But this may owe more to errors than to technical problems.

The Tu-154 has for 25 years been the backbone of Russia and the Soviet Union's air transport system.

It has carried half the number of all passengers flown by Aeroflot and its successors in that time, with that number peaking at 137 million per year in 1990.

A total of 923 have been built, and approximately 530 remain in service in Russia.

The aircraft entered service in 1972 and was "modernised" in 1986, with new engines and equipment to improve its fuel consumption and flight operations.

History

The Chinese Government decided late last year to withdraw the 154 fleet from its airlines by 1 July, and so this and several others were sold back to Russia.

It returned to the factory where it had been built, in Samara, and received a complete overhaul, although it is not yet clear whether this covered the engines.

Since its service entry, some 28 154s have been lost in accidents, a figure about normal for the quantity, years of service and technology of the type.

Difficult conditions

The accident record of the 154 compares quite well with the 68 727s lost of over 1,600 built.

However, the comparison is not totally valid - a 727 generally flies more often than a 154, and the 154 flies in a region with not so good air traffic control and navigation equipment, and in very difficult weather conditions.

The 154 accidents include several that have little relation to the aircraft.

In 1982, an aircraft landing at Omsk in Russia in a heavy snowstorm - normal for Russian winters - hit six snowploughs that had not been told to leave the runway as the aircraft landed.

Freak accidents

And about five have been shot down by enemy or terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Georgia and Afghanistan during the civil wars in those countries.

One landed safely in a field after its cargo of cigarettes caught fire but was completely burnt.

Another ran out of fuel five miles short of the runway when the state airline of an almost bankrupt country decided to carry less fuel from its base, where the price was high.

Up until July 2001, only two Tu-154 accidents had involved technical failure.

The 154M is likely to remain in service in Russia and the CIS for another 10 or 12 years.

Regards,

AnDrEw M

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

It is even worse. The bulk of the Russian Pax. were children

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Andrew M

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

I am particularly upset this morning. We are supposed to be living in one of the most advanced places in the world as far as air safety is concerned. It seems that from the BEA affair over Yugoslavia, when two airliners crashed in the same conditions, we haven´t been able to learn anything.....in 2002...the action repeats with the lost of children.....I don´t want to image that ATC had anything to do with this. In the area, a frontier of three countries, the ATC is changed to different countries. The Tupolev of course didn´t have TCAS and might have communitaction problems and even had lost control, but the B757 is supposed to have TCAS. I can´t understand what went wrong. But I, after my affair some days ago,with the uncontrolled Challeger in my city airport, I am starting to feel really concerned. How many times, near air misses were reported?. Russian planes, overflying Europe, should be force to carry TCAS. Lost of questions here. God be with them.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

Russian Jet, Plane Collide in Germany
Tue Jul 2, 4:08 AM ET
By OLIVER SCHMALE, Associated Press Writer

UEBERLINGEN, Germany (AP) - A Russian passenger jet filled with children collided with a cargo plane late Monday over southern Germany in a fireball, scattering flaming wreckage for about 20 miles, officials and a travel agent said. There were believed to be no survivors.

A Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 from Moscow was bound for Barcelona, Spain, when it hit a two-pilot Boeing 757 from the DHL delivery service, said Wolfgang Wenzel, a police spokesman in the German city of Tuebingen. The planes were believed to have been flying at an altitude of about 36,000 feet when they collided.

At Moscow's Domodedovo airport, Bashkirian representative Sergei Rybanov said 47 children, 10 adults and 12 crew were aboard the Russian plane. They flew into Moscow's Sheretmeyevo airport on Saturday, but missed their connection to Spain and requested that the airline organize a special flight to Barcelona, he said Tuesday.

In Moscow, Tatiana Ostapenko said her Soglasiye Tourist company helped organize the charter trip and that there were 44 children on board accompanied by five adults.

"We are in shock," Ostapenko said.

The planes came down near Ueberlingen on the northern shore of Lake Constance, which borders Switzerland and Austria. The area is some 135 miles south of Frankfurt.

A German official said the collision happened when the Tu-154 pilot was asked by Swiss air traffic controllers to descend but did not respond to the request. The DHL pilot tried to change course, but it was too late to avoid the crash, said Ulrich Mueller, the Baden-Wuerttemberg state environment minister.

Search crews found the Tupolev's flight data recorder, he said.

Witnesses said they heard a noise like thunder and saw a fireball erupt in the night sky, and three large pieces of wreckage plunged to the ground. Scattered fires were sparked in the rural area, but there were no casualties on the ground, authorities said.

The crash happened a few minutes after Swiss air traffic controllers took over both planes from their German colleagues — a handover illustrating the fragmented nature of European airspace.

Swiss controllers asked the Russian plane's pilot several times to descend without getting a reply. By the time the pilot reacted, the cargo plane received an automatic cockpit warning that it was on a collision course and descended too, leading to the crash, said Anton Maag, a spokesman for Swiss controllers.

"The problem was that the Russian plane did not respond immediately," Maag said in Zurich. "The descent was begun very late. The double descent led to both planes flying at the same altitude and hitting each other."

"At such an altitude, it would be a wonder if anyone survived," said Wenzel, the police spokesman.

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. When he went outside, a landing gear was lying a few feet from his home.

Axel Gietz, head of corporate affairs at DHL in Brussels, Belgium, confirmed that the company's plane went down in the collision, killing the British pilot, Paul Phillips, and his Canadian co-pilot, Brant Campioni. A German air controller, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the DHL plane was going from Bahrain to Brussels.

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. By daybreak, rescue workers had recovered 11 bodies from smoking wreckage after the two planes collided at 11:43 p.m.

Bashkirian Airlines, which is headquartered in Ufa, the capital of the southern Russian republic of Bashkortostan, 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 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.

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.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

This is terrible.....about time airlines stop using TU 154s. The TU 154 was not responding to the ATC....but the DHL B757 had the anti-collision radar on...the B757 hit with the wing on the TU 154. Yes.....worst part....70% killed are kids. This is the second mid-air collision in the history of civil aviation, first being in India between a Air Kazakhstan Yak 40 and a Saudi B747.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

I have just heard. Both planes had TCAS.....INCREDIBLE¡. It seems that the passengers plane took a long time before he swift frecuencies from Munich to Zurich ATC.....If both airlines had TCAS...WHY have they crashed?.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 02-07-02 AT 03:47 PM (GMT)]The news was saying it was probably pilot error,they said this morning that there might of been language problems between the ATC and the Russian pilot.
I was quite amazed by how the pilot of the DHL did not change his altitude,however,the news said that by the time that the ATC had warned the aircraft it was to late because the Autopilot was on...would this be correct?
Its quite annoying to see the news stations point straight to the fact a TU-154 was involved.Bad safety record,Russian aircraft,ect,but it had nothing to do with the condition of the aircraft!
This is a picture of the actual crash.
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/0,1518,grossbild-195133-203526,00.html

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 02-07-02 AT 03:53 PM (GMT)]Here it was said the TU 154 did not have a TCAS..... while the B757 did....the pilot did try to get out of the way....even if the TU 154 have a TCAS system...god knows when it was last upgraded and even if it matched the FAA's latest upgrading performence. You know everything works in Russia, they really dont care much, specialy small carriers like these.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

[updated:LAST EDITED ON 02-07-02 AT 05:54 PM (GMT)]The two Belgian pilots who flew the 757 were very experienced, said the DHL-spokesman. There can always be a problem between two national traffic centres, but I guess the problem was with the Russian Tupolev.

In recent history, were there similar accidents at an altitude of 33000 feet? AFAIK this is very rare.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

Were they both Belgian?According to BBC one was British.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

The DHL 757 crew were not Belgian, the pilot was British, Capt Paul Phillips, and the co-pilot was a Canadian, Brant Campioni.
At the end of the day a very tragic accident.
Regards, Dazza.

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

here it has been told that the Tupolev had been fitted the TCAS. Just something really loathsome which makes me feel shameful to be a human being. A Russian man has lost his wife and two sons on the crash. He was desolated, so he pedge the airlines to be taken to Zurich to the crash site because he hadn´t money for the ticket. ALL REFUSED TO TAKE HIM FOR FREE. I know airlines are business, but humanity and solidarity is a must now. And even taking into account the they normally take the pilots lovers and friends for free they shouldn´t be so cruel and fussy. The media knew that, was made public and then, all filthy airlines were pushing each other for taking him in first class (of course in front of the journalists). This hypocresy makes me throw up. Puajjj

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RE: Aircraft collide over Germany

Aparently first ATC call to warn Tu154 was 50 SECONDS before impact. Both aircraft dived to avert each other!

Regards,

AnDrEw M