Comair Limited Flight 206

Comair Limited Flight 206
An Embraer EMB-110 Bandeirante with similar painting
Accident summary
Accident type	Bomb explosion
place	Wadeville , Germiston , South Africa
date	March 1, 1988
Fatalities	17th
Survivors	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante
operator	Bop Air for Comair Limited
Mark	ZS-LGP
Departure airport	Hendrik Van Eck Airport , Phalaborwa , South Africa
Destination airport	Jan Smuts International Airport , Johannesburg , South Africa
Passengers	15th
crew	2
Lists of aviation accidents

Comair Limited flight 206 (flight number IATA : MN206 ; ICAO : CAW206 ) was a scheduled regional domestic flight of the South African Comair Limited from Phalaborwa to Johannesburg . On March 1, 1988, an aircraft accident occurred on this flight with 17 deaths. The leasing machine of type Embraer EMB 110 of Bop Air was doing near Wadeville torn apart in flight by a bomb. The alleged author was a passenger of the machine.

machine

The aircraft concerned was an Embraer EMB-110P1 Bandeirante built in 1982 with the serial number 110402. The aircraft had the aircraft registration number ZS-LGP . The twin-engine regional airliner was with two turboprop engines of the type Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A-34 equipped and approved for 18 people. The machine was registered in 1982 with the aircraft registration PT-SFT for the manufacturer Embraer . In December 1983 the machine was handed over to the British CSE Aviation and approved with the new G-BKZX registration . On January 20, the machine was handed over to Bop Air ( Bophuthatswana Air) from South Africa and received its last registration number ZS-LGP . The machine was one of three Embraer EMB 110s operated by Bop Air. At the time of the accident, the aircraft was leased to the South African Comair Limited .

Passengers

For the scheduled flight from Phalaborwa to Johannesburg, 15 passengers were seated in the plane. At that time, Phalaborwa was already an economically important center for the extraction of copper ores and phosphate raw materials ( Palabora Igneous Complex ) in South Africa. At the time of the plane crash, a very large opencast mine was in operation here. In addition, due to its geographical proximity to the Kruger National Park, the place has long been known for its tourist frequency. Eleven of the passengers were South Africans, and there were also two tourist couples from Hamburg and Vienna on board who had gone on a safari in the Kruger National Park and wanted to travel back to Johannesburg to fly back to their home countries from the international airport there.

crew

The two-person crew consisted of the 38-year-old captain Geoff Neil and the 28-year-old first officer Stan Wainer. No flight attendants were provided on the regional flight.

the accident

The take-off and cruising flight of the machine went off without any special incidents. When the aircraft was approaching Johannesburg at dusk at 17:25 local time , the pilots reported that they were preparing for landing. No problems were reported on board with this last radio message. Three minutes later, eyewitnesses on the ground saw the Embraer torn in two in the air over the Wadeville industrial estate , Germiston , just eight miles south of the destination airport. The debris of the machine fell on the building of a bottling plant of the Coca-Cola Company . All 17 people on board were killed. The debris of the two fuselage sections fell at a distance of 250 meters from each other.

Victim

Most of the debris and corpses had to be recovered from factory roofs. Of those killed, 13 were residents and four were tourists from Europe.

nationality	Passengers	crew	total
South Africa	11	2	13
Austria	2	-	2
Germany	2	-	2
total	15th	2	17th

Cause and originator

During the aircraft accident investigation, it was found that a bomb consisting of nitroglycerine and ammonium nitrate had been detonated on board the aircraft . The alleged perpetrator is the South African miner Emil Schultz, who had marital problems and was heavily in debt. Schultz had previously worked in a farm, where he had been fired, and in the open pit he worked as a shift supervisor. In both professions, Schultz had access to explosives or to substances that could be used to build a bomb. Schultz had also taken out high life insurance shortly before the flight.

The investigation found deficiencies in the security controls at Phalaborwa Airport. The main luggage of the passengers had been checked, but not the hand luggage , and no body scans were made. The investigators assumed that Schultz had taken the bomb on board in his hand luggage. Emil Schultz's perpetration could not be proven beyond doubt.

swell

• Accident report in the Aviation Safety Network .
• Crash victims identified , UPI Archives, March 2, 1988.
• Anna Louw: Explosives carred , 1989.
• Aircraft accident report on planecrashinfo.com
• Operating history of the machine on rzjets.net

Individual evidence

1. ^ Comair flight bombed (March 1, 1988). In: FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD: AN AFRICAN AVIATION ODYSSEYS. Edited by Capt Donald L. Van Dyke, FRAeS. P. 256f.
2. ↑ Bop Air aircraft

Coordinates: 26 ° 16 ′ 9.7 ″  S , 28 ° 11 ′ 14.2 ″  E