Flight accident of KLM Fokker F.XXII "Kwikstaart"
| Flight accident of the F.XXII "Kwikstaart" | |
|---|---|
,_in_the_air_1930s.jpg) Identical aircraft |
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| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | Engine failure after starting |
| place | Hoofddorp , near Amsterdam Airport Schiphol |
| date | July 14, 1935 |
| Fatalities | 6th |
| Survivors | 14th |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Fokker F.XXII |
| operator | Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij |
| Mark | PH-AJQ |
| Surname | Kwikstaart |
| Departure airport | Schiphol Airport, Netherlands
|
| Destination airport |
Malmö / Bulltofta Airport , Sweden
|
| Passengers | 15th |
| crew | 5 |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
The flight accident of the Fokker F.XXII of the Dutch airline Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij (KLM), baptized under the name "Kwikstaart", occurred on July 14, 1935 near Amsterdam Airport Schiphol . Six of the 20 occupants were killed in the accident.
Airplane and occupants
The four-engine aircraft with the registration number PH-AJQ, one of only four built copies of the Fokker F.XXII type, was delivered to KLM on April 25, 1935 with the serial number 5358. By the time the accident occurred, the machine had completed 51 flight hours. The interior of the Fokker F.XXII was considered “luxurious”, so it was also called the “flying restaurant”.
On the day of the accident, 20 people were on board the "Kwikstaart" ( Dutch for stilt ): 15 passengers and five crew members. The flight captain was the 31-year-old German Heinz Silberstein, a former Lufthansa pilot with a lot of flight experience; other crew members were the chief mechanic G. F. Nieboer, G. Brom, L. J. van Dijk and the steward J. Haberer.
the accident
The machine started on Sunday morning at 9:37 a.m. from Schiphol Airport for a scheduled flight to Malmö , with scheduled stopovers in Hamburg and Copenhagen . Immediately after take-off there were problems with the fuel supply to the two left propeller motors, which caused them to fail. The aircraft lost altitude, brushed against the Geniedijk , part of the former position of Amsterdam , and at 9:40 a.m. hit the embankment of the Rijksweg 4 motorway, which has not yet been officially opened .
The accident was observed by a group of around 30 ASC Olympia cyclists who were staging a cycling race on the new motorway from Amsterdam to The Hague . The athletes ran to the burning plane, and 19-year-old Kick Pruijs was the only one to venture inside. He helped passengers climb out, literally pushing some of them out of the plane. He couldn't free the four crew members in the cockpit because he couldn't open the metal door. Eventually Pruijs jumped out of the plane after shouts of warning from his fellow sportsmen, and it went up in flames a few seconds later. Of the 20 people on board, six died, two British passengers and four crew members. The steward J. Haberer survived because he was not in the cockpit. Eight people are said to have owed their lives to Pruijs; others saved themselves.
Pruijs reported in later years that there was panic among the inmates and they had screamed. The Danish engineer Ove Peterson, however, stated that there was no panic. The steward Haberer helped him get off the plane. Among the survivors was Axel Gauffin , director of the Swedish National Museum , who had attended the 50th anniversary of the new Rijksmuseum Amsterdam the day before . The four-man crew was buried on July 18 with a large public participation in the Zorgvlied cemetery in Amsterdam.
The crash was the third accident that KLM hit in a short period of time. On December 20, 1934 and April 6, 1935, there had already been two crashes. After the accident with the Kwikstaart , there were two more, so that the KLM had to record five crashes within seven months.
Rescuer kick Pruijs
Christiaan (Jacobus Johannes) "Kick" Pruijs (1916–2006) enjoyed national success as an amateur cyclist in the 1930s. His rescue operation in this aircraft accident was long forgotten. His uncle and supervisor Cas Pruijs, also known as Cas de Leugenaar (Caas the Liar) , pushed himself into the foreground after the crash, and the shy nephew was denied public recognition. Kick Pruijs then broke off contact with his uncle. He only received a thank you letter from the Dutch cycling association Koninklijke Nederlandsche Wielren Unie (KNWU) and on his 65th birthday, 45 years later, a telegram from KLM, which Pruijs assumed was a joke by his club mates.
When the journalist Gijs Zandbergen became a member of the ASC Olympia , he found out about these events. In 2000 he published Pruijs' report in de Volkskrant and was committed to honoring it. On May 10, 2014, eight years after Pruijs' death, a bridge for cyclists and pedestrians was named over Autobahn 4 near the Kick Pruijsbrug crash site . In the same year the steel bridge received a Footbridge Award .
Web links
- Photos from the crash
- Heldersche Courant - July 16, 1935 - page 2. In: kranten.archiefalkmaar.nl. Retrieved December 25, 2016 (Dutch).
- Uit het leven van Kick Pruijs. In: Amsterdam Noord. Retrieved December 25, 2016 (Dutch).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Kwikstaart. In: aviacrash.nl. Retrieved December 25, 2016 .
- ↑ Bart van der Klaauw: Fokker's case . In: AIR International April 1995, p. 218
- ↑ a b Vergeten wielrenner: Kick Pruijs. In: hetiskoers.nl. November 14, 2016, accessed December 25, 2016 (Dutch).
- ^ The Outlook. (PDF) The Schiphol Accident. In: FLIGHT, July 18, 1935. Flightglobal.com, July 18, 1935, p. 69 , accessed on August 17, 2014 (English): “Cdr. Silberstein was an extremely experienced pilot and was known to have what is now spoken of as the "Nordic temperament." "
- ^ A b Bicycle Dutch: Cycle Bridge named after a 'racing cyclist and rescuer'. In: bicycledutch.wordpress.com. February 8, 2015, accessed December 25, 2016 .
- ↑ a b c d Peter de Greef / Gijs Zandbergen: Een heel other vfluguigramp. In: de Volkskrant . December 9, 2000, accessed December 25, 2016 (Dutch).
- ↑ Drie KLM vliegrampen in één week. In: vergetenverleden.nl. Retrieved December 25, 2016 .
- ^ De held van Olympia - ASC Olympia. (No longer available online.) In: ascolympia.nl. May 4, 2014, archived from the original on December 25, 2016 ; Retrieved December 25, 2016 (Dutch). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Footbridge awards 2014: winners revealed. In: ridge Design & Engineering. Retrieved December 25, 2016 .
