Aeroflot Flight 315 (1959)

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Aeroflot Flight 315 (1959)
An-10 in Monino.jpg

Aeroflot aircraft of the same construction
Accident summary
Accident type Loss of controllability due to icing
place Lviv Airport , Ukrainian SSRUkraine Soviet Socialist RepublicUkrainian SSR 
date November 16, 1959
Fatalities 40
Survivors 0
Aircraft
Aircraft type Soviet Union 1955Soviet Union Antonov An-10
operator Soviet Union 1955Soviet Union Aeroflot
Mark Soviet Union 1955Soviet Union CCCP-11167
Departure airport Moscow Vnukovo Airport , Russian SFSRRussia Soviet Federal Socialist RepublicRussian SFSR 
Destination airport Lviv Airport, Ukrainian SSRUkraine Soviet Socialist RepublicUkrainian SSR 
Passengers 32
crew 8th
Lists of aviation accidents

On November 16, 1959, an Antonov An-10 crashed on the inner-Soviet scheduled flight Aeroflot - Flight 315 from Moscow to Lviv , killing all 40 occupants.

Plane and crew

The aircraft concerned was an Antonov An-10 ( aircraft registration number : CCCP-11167, serial number : 9401402), which was completed on June 5, 1959 and since its first use on July 1, 1959, had completed 277 operating hours.

The crew consisted of a flight captain , a first officer , a flight engineer , a navigator , a flight attendant and 3 flight attendants.

course

The An-10 was scheduled to fly four flights that day; first from Kiev to Lviv, then from Lviv to Moscow, from Moscow to Lviv and finally from Lviv to Kiev. It took off at 16:48 in Wnukowo for the third of the flights mentioned and rose to a cruising altitude of 7,000 m. There were no problems until the approach to Lviv. When the pilots made radio contact with Lviv Airport, they received clearance to descend and information about the landing conditions. The pilots adhered to the given approach pattern. At a height of 200 m, the master reported the overflying of the outer marker . When the aircraft then flew out of the clouds, the pilots switched to visual flight , continued the descent on the correct glide path and fully extended the flaps (by 45 °) before reaching the inner marker . Then the plane went into a nosedive over and struck at 19:06 with his nose to 25 ° inclined downward ( pitch angle ) and without banked in a snowy field, 2,100 meters before the runway threshold on. It then overturned, exploded and burned out.

Investigations

The weather in Lviv at 7:00 p.m. was very cloudy with a wind from 140 ° (southeast) at 6 m / s at a temperature of −1 ° C and a humidity of 97%, which caused ice formation.

The investigators came to the conclusion that the propellers of the two inner engines generated a braking force due to an incorrect propeller position. This would have happened because the pilots who were busy deploying the landing flaps had accidentally hit the corresponding switch and would not have seen the corresponding light. According to the investigators, the switch that sets the propeller at its respective angle was placed in an unfavorable position in the cockpit .

Without knowing this, the captain would have withdrawn the thrust levers in order to brake to the correct speed, either because they were flying too fast or the speedometer was showing incorrect values ​​due to icing. Then he would have noticed the loss of speed and the high rate of descent, whereupon the engines would have adjusted to more thrust and pulled the control horn , which could not prevent the upstroke due to the low altitude.

additional

The following year another An-10 crashed on the same flight while approaching Lviv under similar circumstances. Tests showed that the design of the An-10 made it vulnerable to icing. In icing conditions with flaps extended, she tended to lower her nose and dive into a dive, which was the cause of the two accidents. This happened because under such circumstances the angle of attack on the horizontal stabilizer reached supercritical values.

consequences

The flight manual was changed after the two accidents in such a way that it prohibited the flaps from being extended by more than 15 ° in icing conditions. The de-icing system for the horizontal stabilizer has also been improved.

swell