50+ children lost lives in airline crash
Submitted by Genghis on 2002-07-2 10:34:30, Tuesday
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Two Jets Collide High Above Southern Germany By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 10:15 a.m. ET UEBERLINGEN, Germany (AP) -- More than 50 Russian children headed for a beach vacation in Spain were among more than 70 people killed when their chartered Tupolev airliner slammed into a cargo plane over southern Germany, officials said Tuesday. Swiss air traffic controllers said the pilot of the Russian Tu-154 did begin descending until he was given a third order to decrease altitude. The head of Moscow's Domodedovo airport, from which the Bashkirian Airlines jet originated, denied the Russian pilot failed to follow directions. ``All the sources of the accident are to be found in the skies over Europe. I am 100 percent certain of this,'' said Sergei Rudakov in a report broadcast on Russia's RTR television. The German government agency for air accident investigations said the Russian pilot was given only about 50 seconds to correct his altitude. It said he also reacted after the second warning, about 25 seconds before the crash at 36,000 feet over Lake Constance. Russia's state-run RTR television said a German police official also said the Russian plane received its first warning from Swiss controllers just 50 seconds before it was to cross paths with the cargo plane. 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 the waters looking for flotsam or telltale jet fuel slicks. 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. The parents of the children were high-ranking officials in Bashkortostan, a Russian republic in the southern Ural Mountains. Abas Galyamov of the republic's Moscow mission said the children were headed for a beach holiday on the Costa Dorada near Barcelona. The children were the best students at the UNESCO-affiliated school in Ufa, the Bashkirian capital. Din Uzhin, a group leader for the students, told The Associated Press he was supposed to have flown with them but did not get his Spanish visa and stayed behind in Moscow. ``The parents of the children are calling nonstop asking whether I know anything about the fate of their children,'' he said Tuesday. ``And I have to say time and again: Your children were on that plane.'' The cargo plane was a Boeing 757 owned by DHL package delivery service, based in Brussels, Belgium, and San Francisco. It was flying from Bahrain to the company's hub in Brussels. Anton Maag, chief of the air traffic control tower in Zurich, said the air traffic controller was experienced and gave the first descent order to the Russian plane about two minutes before the collision. ``This is normally sufficient,'' he said. But the Russian plane began to decrease altitude only after a third request, Maag said. At the same time, the DHL plane's automatic collision warning system issued an order to descend, and pilots are obliged to follow these instructions, Maag said. It was not clear why the Swiss version of the warning chronology differed from the German and Russia accounts. Patrick Herr, a spokesman for Swiss air traffic control, said it is not yet known why the warning system told pilots on the DHL plane to descend when the other plane was also decreasing altitude. ``There are two mysteries,'' Herr said. ``Firstly, why the Tupolev pilot didn't react straight away. And secondly, why the automatic warning system of the Boeing also gave a descent order.'' Russian aviation authorities angrily denied pilot error as a possible cause, saying the Tu-154 pilot had years of experience and spoke English well and would have understood instructions to descend. Sepp Moser, one of Switzerland's best known aviation experts, said on Swiss television that both the collision warning system on the Boeing and the actions of Swiss air traffic control should be investigated as well as the Russian plane's moves. ``I am astounded that (Swiss air traffic control) said they will only focus on two issues: on the Russian pilot and on the warning system in the freight plane. I think that the behavior of Swiss air traffic authorities should be examined on a second-by-second basis.'' A European Union official denied this year's radical overhaul of Europe's air traffic management, halving the minimum distances between aircraft, was to blame for the tragedy. ``There's no link here,'' said Gilles Gantelet, a spokesman for the EU's executive commission. ``The problem is that the plane wasn't where it was supposed to be. The only way to change that was in asking the plane to change route.'' Witnesses said they heard a noise like thunder and saw a fireball erupt in the night sky, then saw pieces of wreckage falling to the ground and into Lake Constance. Scattered fires were sparked in the rural area, but there were no casualties on the ground. 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 large piece of one of the plane's landing gear was lying a few feet from his home. Debris from the Tupolev's wing and fuselage also came down outside a house on the edge of Owingen, about two miles from where the tail was found. The nearest piece of wreckage was about 30 feet from the house and, while an awning was burned, the house was otherwise undamaged and the family inside unharmed. More than 800 rescue workers were searching the area around the shores of Lake Constance, one of Europe's largest and shared by Austria, Germany and Switzerland. It is a popular vacation spot dotted with sailboats in the summer. Russian President Vladimir Putin dispatched investigators and the Russian general consul in the Germany city of Bonn to the crash scene, while German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder sent German Transport Minister Kurt Bodewig. 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. Russian officials at the emergency situations ministry and the tour agency that helped organize the trip said eight of the children were younger than 12 and that 44 were between 12 and 16 years old. At the airport in Ufa, the capital of Bashkortostan, parents of the children were trying to get to Germany and relatives were expected to arrive by Wednesday. ``If only they had flown on time, nothing would have happened,'' said a woman who was identified as the mother of 11-year-old Bulat Biglov. The group was supposed to have left Saturday for Spain, but missed its connection and had to wait. The woman, shown on NTV television, was in tears. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were set aside for mourning in Bashkortostan. A DHL spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said their aircraft was built in 1990 and purchased by his company in 1999 from British Airways, which had used it as a passenger jet. 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. ``There were no indications of any technical or operational problems with the aircraft,'' he said. |
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