Crash of a Mozambican Tupolev Tu-134 1986

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Crash of a Mozambican Tupolev Tu-134 1986
Samora Machel Plane Wreck.jpg

Debris from the crashed Tu-134
Accident summary
Accident type Controlled flight into terrain
place at Mbuzini
date October 19, 1986
Fatalities 34
Survivors 10
Aircraft
Aircraft type Tupolev Tu-134A-3
operator People's Republic of Mozambique
Mark C9-CAA
Departure airport Mbala airport
Destination airport Maputo airport
Passengers 35
crew 9
Lists of aviation accidents

The Mozambican Tupolev Tu-134 crash in 1986 was an aircraft accident in South Africa with far-reaching political consequences.

On October 19, 1986, the Mozambican government aircraft , a Tupolev Tu-134A-3 , crashed on a flight from Mbala Airport in Zambia to the Mozambican capital Maputo on the territory of the Republic of South Africa near the town of Mbuzini in the Lebombo Mountains at position 25 ° 54 ′ 41 ″  S , 31 ° 57 ′ 26 ″  E ab. Of the 35 passengers and nine crew members , only nine passengers and the flight engineer survived. The passengers killed included the Mozambican President Samora Machel and ministers and officials of the Mozambican government, including the Minister of Transport Alcântara Santos, Machel's advisor Fernando Honwana and the diplomat and scientist Aquino de Bragança . The crash led to numerous conspiracy theories , according to which the then South African apartheid government was involved in the crash, but this could not be proven.

flight

The accident machine C9-CAA

The government aircraft with the registration number C9-CAA took off from Mbala on October 19, 1986 at 18:38 local time and was expected in Maputo at 21:25. The flight crew members (captain, first officer , flight engineer, on-board navigator and radio operator) were all citizens of the USSR and were familiar with the flight conditions over Mozambique and Maputo Airport . The weather conditions on the flight route were favorable.

Apparently at 9:18 p.m., the aircraft began the landing approach at an assumed distance of 60 km from Maputo. However, the crew could neither make out electrical landing aids nor airport lighting. At 21:21:39 hrs, the machine made contact with the ground 65 km west of Maputo at an altitude of 666 m in a hilly area; a good 150 m from the South African-Mozambican border .

After radio contact between the plane and Maputo Airport was broken, the Mozambican government and the military were alerted. Since after the last contact it was assumed that the machine was only a good four minutes' flight away from Maputo, the first search measures only took place in the vicinity of the capital.

At around 11 p.m. the South African police station in Komatipoort was notified of the crash of an airplane by a resident of Mbuzini. A police officer arrived at the scene of the accident at 11:40 pm and the first rescue workers arrived at 1:00 am on October 20, 1986. At 4:00 am, a South African helicopter landed at the scene of the accident and transported the survivors to a hospital . Of the crew, only the flight engineer survived. One of the survivors died two and a half months after the crash from his injuries.

The Mozambican minister Sérgio Vieira later received the government documents found in the wreck from "Commissioner of police" Johann Coetzee in South Africa , which had already been copied by the South African side.

Investigations

The South African government set up the Margo Commission , named after chairman Cecil Margo, judge at the South African Supreme Court , to investigate the cause of the accident . The commission consisted of three South Africans and three foreigners from Great Britain and the USA. It met in public for several days from January 20, 1987, and later announced the results of its investigation, according to which the crew had failed:

“The cause of the accident was that the flight crew failed to follow procedural requirements for an instrument let-down approach, but continued to descend under visual flight rules in darkness and some cloud, ie without having some contact with the ground, below minimum safe altitude and minimum assigned altitude, and in addition ignored the GPWS alarm. "

"The cause of the accident was that the crew did not descend following the instructions of an instrument flight , but continued in the dark and some clouds in visual flight , i.e. without connection to air traffic control, below the safety altitude and the instructed minimum altitude and also ignored the GPWS alarm . "

The Mozambican and Soviet authorities questioned the results of the investigation in their statements. The Soviet report assumed that a fatal 37 ° course deviation to starboard , which had led to the crash, was due to a false VOR signal, which had served as a decoy to bring the machine down in a targeted manner. This false signal was also picked up by a Boeing 737 from the Mozambican LAM.

Further investigations

After the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reopened an investigation; the final report was published in 2001. New findings were not obtained, but requests were made to carry out further investigations in a targeted manner. The investigations were again criticized because no flight specialist was involved in the investigation.

In the meantime, however, it was considered certain that the aircraft had flown into a South African flight safety zone due to its course deviation, which was monitored by radar . The machine had definitely not been warned by the South African side.

In January 2003, former member of the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) Hans Louw , who was serving a long prison sentence in South Africa at the time, claimed that he was involved in a plot to murder Machel and that he had been deployed near the crash site. This statement was supported by another alleged member of the conspiracy group, Edwin Mudingi, but further South African investigations were unable to verify this information.

Culture of remembrance

In 1999 the Portuguese-Mozambican architect José Forjaz built the Samora Machel Monument at the crash site at the expense of the South African government : a memorial with 35 windpipes to symbolize the 35 dead. The inauguration of the monument was attended by the then President Nelson Mandela and his wife Graça (Samora Machel's widow ) as well as the Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Honwana portrait (PDF) mozambiquehistory.com (English), accessed on January 4, 2015
  2. ↑ Report from the first hearing at sahistory.org.za (English), accessed on January 5, 2015
  3. ^ Investigation report by the South African authorities ( memento of April 10, 2012 on WebCite ) (PDF; English), accessed on January 1, 2015
  4. ↑ Report at sahistory.org.za (English), accessed on January 5, 2015