China Northwest Airlines Flight 2119

China Northwest Airlines Flight 2119
	An identical BAe 146-300 from China Northwest Airlines
Accident summary
Accident type	Runway deal due to technical failure
place	Yinchuan , Ningxia , People's Republic of China
date	July 23, 1993
Fatalities	56
Survivors	57
Injured	56
Aircraft
Aircraft type	BAe 146-300
operator	China Northwest Airlines
Mark	B-2716
Departure airport	Yinchuan Airport , People's Republic of China;
Destination airport	Beijing Airport , People's Republic of China;
Passengers	108
crew	5
	Lists of aviation accidents

The China Northwest Airlines Flight 2119 (Flight number: WH2119 ) was a scheduled domestic flight to the Chinese airline China Northwest Airlines from the airport Yinchuan to Beijing Capital International Airport . On July 23, 1993, an almost new and fully occupied BAe 146-300 crashed while taking off. 56 out of 113 people on board were killed in the accident.

At the time, it was the worst incident involving a BAe 146, but this was exceeded in 2003 and 2016 by the accident flights Turkish Airlines flight 634 and LaMia flight 2933 .

plane

The aircraft involved in the accident was a British-made BAe 146-300. The machine was the work of British Aerospace at factory airfield Woodford , Metropolitan Borough of Stockport , built. The BAe 146 belonged to a new generation of British passenger aircraft after the aging Hawker Siddeley Trident was increasingly being decommissioned.

The aircraft destroyed in the accident had the factory number E3215. The machine had completed its maiden flight on December 5, 1992 with the test number G-6-215 . On December 29, 1992, the delivery to China Northwest Airlines, which was founded in 1988 and emerged from CAAC , followed. The machine received the aircraft registration B-2716 . The four-engine short - haul aircraft was equipped with four Lycoming LF507-1H engines. At the time of the accident, the machine was operating for around 500 hours.

Inmates

There were 113 people on board the machine, including 108 passengers and 5 crew members. Most of the inmates were native Chinese , but there was also a British woman, a Hong Kong resident , a Frenchman, and one other person of foreign origin.

Flight plan

The flight was planned as a direct flight from Yinchuan to Beijing . The last ticket for the flight was sold at 2:25 pm on the day of departure. The machine was originally supposed to start at 2:30 p.m., but ultimately started with a 10-minute delay.

the accident

The crew received clearance to take off from runway 36. The take-off run began around 14:40. The pilots accelerated the machine, but it did not rotate after it had reached take-off speed . Finally the captain was able to pull up the nose of the aircraft, but the stern slid over the runway and the machine did not rise into the air. The pilots then initiated an aborted take-off. The machine rolled over the end of the 2200 meter long runway and initially collided with heaps of earth before it slid into the shallow water of a pond about one meter deep.

Rescue mission and victims

After the incident, hundreds of soldiers and police officers were called to the scene of the accident to help with the rescue operation. 55 passengers and one crew member were killed in the accident. Three crew members and 53 passengers were injured. One crew member was uninjured.

Cause of accident

It turned out that the accident had occurred due to a technical malfunction. When the pilots activated the buoyancy aids , they only extended on the left side, as the servomotor for extending the buoyancy aids on the right-hand side had failed. The machine was aerodynamically unable to take off due to the lift aid being retracted on one side.

Web links

Aircraft accident data and report B-2716 on the Aviation Safety Network , accessed April 12, 2019.
Crash fuels fears of Chinese air safety. In: New Sunday Times (Malaysia). July 25, 1993, p. 13 , accessed April 21, 2020 .
Accident report (Chinese) , accessed April 12, 2019