Shelling of a Douglas C-47 from Sabena near Maribor
| Shelling of a Douglas C-47 from Sabena near Maribor | |
|---|---|
 An identical Sabena machine |
|
| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | Shelling by fighter aircraft |
| place | 10 km south of Maribor , Yugoslavia.svg){kind=small}
|
| date | June 3, 1954 |
| Fatalities | 1 |
| Survivors | 3 |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type |
 Douglas DC-3 / C-47-A-1-DK
|
| operator |
 Sabena
|
| Mark |
OO-CBY
|
| Departure airport |
Blackbushe Airport , United Kingdom
|
| 1. Stopover |
Melsbroek Air Base , Belgium
|
| 2. Stopover |
Munich-Riem Airport , BR Germany
|
| 3. Stopover |
Graz Airport , Austria (alternate airport)
 |
| Destination airport |
Belgrade Dojno Polje Airport , Yugoslavia (not reached)
|
| Passengers | 0 |
| crew | 4th |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
The shelling of a Sabena Douglas C-47 near Maribor was an event during the Cold War . On June 3, 1954, a Douglas DC-3 / C-47-A-1-DK of the Belgian airline Sabena with the registration number OO-CBY was used for a charter cargo flight from Blackbushe Airport in England via Melsbroek Air Base in Belgium and Munich Airport -Riem to Belgrade airport-Doino Polje performed was actually above the non-aligned Yugoslavia by a fighter plane type MiG-15 of the Soviet air Force shot. The projectiles exploding inside the C-47 killed the radio operator. The pilots managed to return to Graz Airport and make an emergency landing there.
machine
The aircraft was a Douglas DC-3 / C-47-A-1-DK. The machine with the serial number 11982 was built during the Second World War at the Douglas Aircraft Company's plant in Oklahoma City , Oklahoma and delivered to the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) on October 21, 1943 with the military aircraft registration number 42-92207 . The machine was sold under the Lending and Lease Act in January 1944 to No. 353 Squadron of the Royal Air Force , where it received the aircraft registration FL575 . On June 26, 1946, the machine was returned to the USAAF and a little later categorized as excess inventory and phased out. The machine was then sold to the Indian Orient Airways and re-registered with the new aircraft registration VT-CGE . For the purpose of resale, the machine was re-registered under the registration number VT-CPK , but the sale did not take place, so that in October 1947 the machine was again registered with the Pakistani airline Orient Airways with the Pakistani registration number AP-AAK . The Sabena took over the machine in June 1953 and registered it with the registration number OO-CBY . The twin-engine medium -haul aircraft was powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-1830-92 Twin Wasp double radial engines , each with an output of 1200 hp.
Background and flight plan
In 1954 the Yugoslav Ministry of Agriculture bought breeding pigs in Great Britain. Sabena had received the order to handle the transport and previously worked with Jugoslovenski Aerotransport (JAT), the Yugoslav national airline. The Sabena cargo flights took place on Monday, May 24, 1954. A total of 17 flights were calculated, which were later expanded to 34 flights. As a rule, two machines flew the route at the same time, but not in formation, but about an hour apart. On the day of the incident, the OO-CBY was the first aircraft, followed by the Sabena's DC-3 OO-AWK .
The flight was supposed to lead from Blackbushe airport in England to Belgrade-Dojno Polje airport , on the way there were two stopovers for refueling at the military airfield Melsbroek near Brussels and the Munich-Riem airport .
crew
The four crew members of the machine were on June 3, the captain Arsène Devreese, the British first officer Douglas Wilson, a former member of the Royal Air Force , the 41-year-old radio operator Jozef Marie Clauwaert (born December 19, 1912 in Aalst ), who was behind the cockpit in the radio room, as well as the on-board mechanic Victor Sluyts. Sluyts, who had been working for the Sabena since June 1949, took care of the systems for transporting the animals during the flight.
the accident
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The flight went to Munich without any significant incidents. The machine took off at 8:03 a.m. local time from Munich-Riem Airport for the onward flight to Belgrade, 55 minutes before the take-off of the OO-AWK aircraft that was flying behind .
According to air traffic control in Munich, the aircraft followed the flight route Amber 10 at an altitude of 10,000 feet to the non-directional radio beacon from Salzburg and then flew to the non-directional radio beacon from Graz via the recommended flight route ADR569. The crew reported that the overflight in Salzburg would take place at 8:31 a.m. local time at an altitude of 11,500 feet, i.e. as stated in the flight plan. The machine reached this altitude at 8:37 a.m. The non-directional radio beacon in Graz was reached at 8:25 a.m. and thus with a delay of 4 minutes. The pilots then changed course in the direction of Zagreb . Between Graz and Zagreb, the master flew on route 12A at an altitude of 7,500 feet, as stated in the flight plan. The weather conditions were good. At 08:28 a.m., air traffic control in Vienna instructed the crew to contact air traffic control in Zagreb. Air traffic control in Vienna informed air traffic control in Zagreb at 8:30 a.m. that the plane was expected to reach Zagreb at 8:55 a.m.
At about the same time, the DC-3 crew noticed a Soviet MiG-15 fighter aircraft approaching their machine. According to Captain Devreese, First Officer Wilson was the first to become aware of the machine four minutes after flying over Graz. Initially, the fighter had flown around the machine at the same height from starboard to port . The MiG then moved significantly closer to the DC-3. Wilson later stated that it was at this point that he felt the vibrations generated by the jet's jets. He could clearly see the silhouette of the pilot. After a third approach, the MiG disappeared from the DC-3's field of vision, whereupon the crew members suspected that the pilot had only carried out an identification order.
The radio operator Jozef Clauwaert was informed that a MiG was nearby. He came into the cockpit to see the plane and went back to his seat. Then the fighter attacked without warning and fired at the DC-3.
At least four projectiles hit the hull of the machine, two exploded inside. A third projectile punctured the hull, but did not penetrate fully into it, but exploded outside. Projectile fragments that hit the aircraft damaged the right fuel tank, among other things. A fourth projectile did not explode, but damaged the right wing and the outer flaps of that wing. The DC-3's hydraulic system was damaged and a control cable for the elevator was hit. The cockpit was pierced as well as the front window of one of the pilots. Some cockpit instruments and the VHF2 control panel were damaged. The chronometer stopped at 8:36 a.m. Projectiles also penetrated the radio cabin. The radio operator Jozef Marie Clauwaert was killed by an explosion. The commander Devreese was seriously injured by splinters in his shoulder, the flight engineer Victor Sluyts only slightly. Some of the animals carried were killed and others injured.
After the attack, Copilot Wilson asked Flight Engineer Sluyts to climb into the rear of the aircraft and inspect the wings and control flaps. The inspection failed the first time due to smoke inside the machine. Sluyts tried a second time and saw no visible structural damage. When the machine flew back into the clouds, Captain Devreese told First Officer Wilson that he had been hit. Wilson then took control of the machine for his injured colleague. He asked him to turn off the autopilot . When Devreese repeatedly failed to respond to his instructions because of his unconsciousness , Wilson switched off the autopilot himself and brought the machine into a right-hand, spiraling descent. He flew evasive maneuvers with the machine, trying to evade into the cloud cover in order to block the view of the DC-3 from the pilot of the interceptor. Wilson flew from cloud to cloud, reducing the speed in the clouds and increasing the speed between the clouds. The pilots tried several times to explain air distress , but the calls were not received. Wilson then realized that the second VHF and a radio compass had been damaged by the fire.
At 08:46 am, air traffic control in Zagreb informed air traffic control in Vienna that they had not been able to contact the aircraft since 08:31 am; the DC-3 is probably over the Austrian-Yugoslav border. At 8:56 a.m., air traffic control in Zagreb asked their colleagues in Vienna whether they had received radio signals from the machine. Three minutes later they received the answer that at 8:53 a.m. emergency signals from an unidentified machine had been received.
While looking for an airport for an emergency landing, the first officer of the shelled DC-3 spotted Graz-Thalerhof airport shortly after 9:00 a.m., which he approached immediately. Shortly before landing, a radio link was established between the tower (118.1 MHz) and the DC-3. The staff in the Graz Tower spoke poor English, but the crew of the OO-CBY were able to make themselves heard. She also made her emergency situation clear by wiggling her wings on approach. When Wilson tried to extend the landing gear , there was no more hydraulic pressure. Since the hydraulic systems had failed due to the bombardment, the landing gear had to be extended manually. Flight engineer Sluyts tried the manual pump, but the pressure did not rise. At a glance, the pilots could tell that the landing gear was extended. Due to the hydraulic failure, the landing flaps could not be extended either, so that the braking behavior of the machine was impaired. First Officer Wilson decided to land without flaps or brakes. Smoke penetrated the cockpit. After circling the airport twice before, Wilson landed the plane on the runway at 9:09 a.m.
Wilson initially intended to have the DC-3 roll straight over the end of the runway, but a ditch at the end of the runway and a woman working in the field behind it induced him to steer the machine sideways from the runway. The DC-3 rolled into a field, tearing a fence with it and coming to a halt on uneven terrain; the underside of the fuselage was damaged by a fence post.
After the landing
After landing, the crew members declared that they had been attacked by a Soviet MiG. According to them, the plane carried the red star of the Soviet army on the fuselage or on the tail. The attack is said to have occurred about ten kilometers south of the Yugoslavian Maribor (now Slovenia) in the border region between Austria and Yugoslavia.
Flight captain Devreese also later testified that he had tried to set a radio compass to the Zagreb radio beacon before the attack . The callsign, a letter code reproduced in Morse code , was received, but the signal was not strong enough to be displayed on the radio compass. Even the civil radio station from Maribor, to which a radio compass was set, could not be received in the air.
Devreese said he temporarily passed out after the attack. When first officer Wilson lowered the plane through the cloud cover, the pilots would have seen a large city with an airport. At that time they did not know which city it was and that it was Graz.
The British military police , which were stationed in the south of occupied post-war Austria at the time, were quickly on site after the landing. Flight captain Devreese was seriously injured by a projectile in his left shoulder and was taken to a hospital in Graz by ambulance. Sluyts also had to go to the hospital for an examination. The military authorities transported the body of the fatally wounded Jozef Clauwaert.
Accident investigation
According to initial reports, a Belgian team of investigators flew to Salzburg on June 3, 1954 (Graz could not be approached due to difficult weather conditions) and drove on to Graz by car. She immediately began investigating the incident. The investigation report was published on July 6, 1954. According to the investigators, it was impossible that the OO-CBY deviated from the route to the Soviet-occupied Burgenland or the closed airspace over Hungary. The Belgian commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that the OO-CBY had been attacked without warning, without the C-47 having been in a closed airspace at any time.
First Officer Wilson stated that at no point did the fighter take any steps to indicate that the Sabena machine should follow him. The Soviet military pilot did not use international conventions such as rolling around the longitudinal axis to ask the DC-3 to follow him.
According to the Belgian investigators, the interception took place in the region between Straß in Styria and Maribor , in the border area between Austria and Yugoslavia. The machine was attacked ten kilometers south of Maribor, eleven minutes after passing Graz and in Yugoslav airspace. It was almost impossible to reconstruct the exact route after the bombardment, but the investigation report indicated that the evasive maneuvers extended as far as the Yugoslav region of Murska Sobota (Yugoslavia, now Slovenia), 50 kilometers east of Maribor.
Reactions
Captain of the following machine OO-AWK of the Sabena
Therasse, the captain of the following Douglas C-47 of the Sabena (OO-AWK) , noted on the back of his flight report that flights over Yugoslav airspace were difficult because the border with Hungary, which is allied with the Soviet Union, runs parallel to the flight route. He stated that if the radio compass displayed incorrectly due to the weather, machines could easily get lost in the blocked airspace. Since there were storms in the region during the OO-AWK flight that day, the crew could not rely on the radio navigation devices. Just one year later, such an incident occurred on the flight route over the Balkans on El-Al-Flight 402 , in which a Lockheed L-149 Constellation lost its way into Bulgarian airspace and was shot down there, with all 58 occupants of the machine died. Therasse stated that, for this reason, flights over Yugoslavia are usually carried out under visual flight conditions , with the highway from Zagreb to Belgrade being used as a visual reference point. Therasse was of the opinion that the navigation infrastructure of Yugoslavia did not meet the requirements.
Soviet Union
Just one day after the accident, the Volksstimme , the central organ of the Austrian Communist Party, wrote that the Belgian aircraft had been attacked because it had violated Hungarian airspace. Reports of this kind about the violation of Soviet-controlled airspace also appeared in other media, such as the Belgian Catholic-conservative newspaper La Libre Belgique .
The Soviet authorities also investigated the incident. According to a note from the Soviet Foreign Ministry dated July 31, 1954, the Sabena had violated the rules for flying over the Soviet occupied zone in Austria.
According to the Soviet report, the aircraft had taken a different course and was 110.25 kilometers northeast of Graz in the Soviet zone at 08:25 and therefore not, as the Belgian investigators had stated, in the permissible air corridor in the border area between Graz and Maribor. At 8:28 a.m., the Soviet fighter plane asked the machine to follow it in accordance with international conventions, but the Belgian pilots refused to obey. At 8:30 a.m., the fighter then fired two warning shots. After the Belgian crew continued to ignore the instructions, the DC-3 was shot at. Then the Belgian plane escaped in the clouds. According to the Soviet authorities, the Belgian pilot ignored all orders from the Soviet pilot. The Soviet government demanded that all necessary measures be taken to ensure that Belgian planes comply with the rules for flying over Soviet zones.
On the day of the accident, the Austrian aviation authority received reports from residents from Stegersbach (Burgenland, Soviet occupation zone, 60 kilometers northeast of Graz Airport) and from Kőszeg (Hungary, 120 kilometers northeast of Graz Airport). A transport aircraft was reported from Stegersbach that had approached at 8:50 a.m. at an altitude of around 1000 meters from a north-north-west direction and was heading in a west-south-west direction. The witnesses in Kőszeg said that around 8:30 a.m., two civil aircraft were attacked by two military jets and a surface-to-air defense system. The Belgian investigation committee ignored these testimonies because the OO-CBY was not flying near the OO-AWK , so there was no question of a second transport aircraft. The crew of the OO-CBY had also officially declared that they had only been attacked by one fighter plane. According to the commission of inquiry, these statements could therefore have nothing to do with the attack on the OO-CBY .
After the Soviet allegations, the three crew members Devreese, Wilson and Sluyts were interrogated again in August 1954, this time only by the Sabena. The manager of the Sabena Anselme Renewe wrote in his letter of August 20, 1954 to the director of the aviation authority that the crew had not deviated from the earlier statements. The crew members stated again that the fighter had not given a signal to follow it, but only circled the DC-3 three times. The pilots could not explain why the information provided by the Soviet side deviated from the route that the crew believed they had taken. They agreed that they could never have reached Graz at 9:09 a.m. if they had been at the point indicated by the Soviets.
The Soviet Union initially refused to pay any compensation. The Soviet government expressed its regrets but refused to accept its responsibility. Later, however, Jozef Clauwaert's wife and son received financial support from the Soviet state.
The whereabouts of the machine
After the incident, the machine was repaired and put back into service. In July 1965 it was sold to Belgian International Air Services , where the machine kept its registration number. From June 1973 the machine was registered with the US aircraft registration N6894 for the Transvaal Corporation , from March 1975 with the registration C-GADY for the Canadian AirGava Ltd. and then with the same label on Les Services Aeriens Fortair Ltd. From May 26, 1982, the machine with the US registration N2668N was registered with Century Airlines Inc. in Pontiac , Michigan , until it was removed from the registration register on May 14, 1991 and exported to Spain . She was finally published with the label EC-699 to the Aero Market Express SA approved, on 20 June 1991 the indicator in was EC-FDH changed. On November 3, 1991, the machine was involved in an incident in which it was damaged beyond repair. The C-47 raised with three occupants into a cargo flight from Barcelona Airport to Palma de Mallorca from. Immediately after takeoff, at an altitude of 200 feet, she suddenly pulled sharply to the left. The captain managed to countersteer, but the machine lost airspeed and had to be made an emergency landing, which resulted in a total economic loss. In March 1995 the machine was scrapped in Barcelona-Sabadell, the bow section was exhibited at the Aeroteca flight school based in Barcelona .
swell
- Accident report on plancecrashinfo.com
- Operating history of the machine on rzjets.net
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Accident Report C-47, OO-CBY , Aviation Safety Network
- ↑ Operating history of the machine on aerialvisuals.ca
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Frans van Humbeek: Belgisch burgervfluguig beschoten door MiG , Hangar Flying , August 14, 2014 (Dutch)
- ^ Accident report C-47, EC-FDH , Aviation Safety Network