Austrian Airlines flight 901

Coordinates: 56 ° 0 '9.4 "  N , 37 ° 5' 45.7"  E

Austrian Airlines flight 901
Undated photo of the crashed machine
Accident summary
Accident type	CFIT
place	Krjukowo ( Zelenograd ), Soviet Union
date	September 26, 1960
Fatalities	31
Survivors	6th
Injured	6th
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Vickers Viscount 837
operator	Austrian Airlines , Austria
Mark	OE-LAF
Departure airport	Warsaw Chopin Airport , Poland
Destination airport	Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport, Soviet Union
Passengers	31
crew	6th
Lists of aviation accidents

On the Austrian Airlines flight 901 on September 26, 1960, a Vickers Viscount 837 of the Austrian airline Austrian Airlines collided with the area when approaching Moscow-Sheremetyevo airport in rainy conditions, killing 31 of the 37 occupants.

Flight history

Flight captain Erwin Wilfing (* 1924) and his copilot Ferdinand Freisleben (* 1921) started the plane at 1:45 p.m. at Vienna-Schwechat airport . The flight led via Warsaw-Okęcie Airport to Moscow-Sheremetyevo Airport, with the arrival time there set for 9:45 p.m. local time. Due to the bad weather in Russia, the flight was already 35 minutes late.

When approaching Moscow-Sheremetyevo Airport, two holding loops were flown and then the control tower gave clearance for runway 07, whereupon the descent began and the landing gear and flaps were extended. Around 10 km west of the airport, near the town of Krjukowo, the plane touched treetops at a height of just 20 m. The pilots tried to correct this mistake and to pull the machine up, which no longer succeeded. The machine cut a 400 m long swath in the dense forest area and caught fire. After the control tower could not reach the aircraft via radio, an alarm was triggered. The accident was followed by a group of students who had quarters not far from the crash site. They were the first helpers on site. The evacuation work in the dense, impassable terrain turned out to be particularly difficult due to the soil softened by rain.

Victim

19 Austrians, six Russians, two Americans, two Indians, an Australian and an Englishman died in the accident. 27 inmates lost their lives directly at the scene of the accident. Ten survivors were taken to the local hospital in Kryukovo, where two of them died. The eight survivors were taken to Moscow's Botkin Hospital, where two Austrians died days later. Most of the victims were in the front of the aircraft.

The Viennese coroner Wilhelm Holczabek was sent to Moscow to identify the bodies . The 25 coffins of the dead, which were not buried in Russia, were brought to Vienna on October 4, 1960 with an Aeroflot charter machine and there were taken over by Federal Chancellor Julius Raab , Vice Chancellor Bruno Pittermann and the grieving relatives.

The only surviving crew member was the stewardess Maria Wernle (* 1932).

Aircraft

The four-engine Vickers Viscount 837 with turboprop propulsion was the first of six newly acquired aircraft to be delivered to AUA in February 1960 at a unit price of just under 35 million schillings , and it was named in the name of the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn . The machine had the serial number 437 and had flown almost 1300 hours before the accident. This was the first and so far last loss of an airplane for the airline, which was founded only three years earlier and which only started its first flights in April 1958.

Cause of accident

The accident was investigated by the Russian authorities and the Austrian Ministry of Transport, represented by Secretary of State Vogl and Felix Schalk, later director of Austrian Airlines.

The cause of the accident was an incorrect display of the altitude in the altimeter , which led to a controlled flight into the terrain . It could not be determined whether the pilots misinterpreted the flight altitude or whether the altimeter in the cockpit was defective. In any case, the air pressure setting of the two altimeters by the pilots differed by 23 millibars, which corresponds to an altitude difference of about 210 meters (690 feet).

The accident reports between Austria and Russia were already exchanged in October and sent to the then Federal Minister for Transport and Electricity, Karl Waldbrunner .

In his book "The Lucona case. Eastern espionage, corruption and murder in the atmosphere of the top government", the author and journalist Hans Pretterebner claims that Udo Proksch , one of the booked passengers on Flight 901 with close contacts to the Soviet secret service KGB , was just before the Abfug at Vienna-Schwechat airport was warned by telephone not to board the plane and then renounced the flight. Pretterebner therefore believes that the Viscount was deliberately brought down during the approach to the Moscow-Sheremetyevo airport on the instructions of the KGB because the height information provided by Moscow air traffic control was too low. The reason for this approach by the Soviet secret service at the height of the Cold War is said to have been to obtain US secret documents that were transported in the hold of the OE-LAF and were intended for the US embassy in Moscow. The British journalist John Miller, who was stationed in Moscow at the time, reports in his memoir that the crash of the OE-LAF was originally covered up by the Soviet side.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Accident report Viscount 800 OE-LAF , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on August 3, 2018.
2. ↑ AUA. crash in Moscow: 30 dead . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna September 28, 1960, p. 1 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
3. ↑ kleinezeitung.at Villacherin survived the plane crash of 1960: "I woke up and my stockings were on fire" ( Memento from August 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), from June 15, 2009
4. ↑ Hans Pretterebner: The case of Lucona. Eastern espionage, corruption and murder in the orbit of the top government . Pretterebner Verlagsgesellschaft, Vienna 1987, ISBN 3-900710-01-5 .
5. ^ Peter Heimig: Peter Heimig: Lech Kaczynski Misfortune or assassination? In: http://www.peter-heimig.com . Peter Heimig, April 12, 2010, accessed March 7, 2020 . 
6. ^ John Miller: All Them Cornfields and Ballet in the Evening . Hodgson Press, Kingston upon Thames 2010, ISBN 1-906164-12-6 , pp. 94 .