Air Congo Douglas DC-4 aircraft accident
| Air Congo Douglas DC-4 aircraft accident | |
|---|---|
 An identical machine to the Air Congo |
|
| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | Loss of control after colliding with an object on the runway |
| place |
Stanleyville Airport , Congo-Kinshasa.svg){kind=small}
|
| date | November 29, 1964 |
| Fatalities | 6th |
| Survivors | 8th |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type |
 Douglas DC-4
|
| operator |
 Belgian International Air Services for Air Congo
|
| Mark |
OO-DEP
|
| Departure airport |
Stanleyville Airport , Congo-Kinshasa
|
| Destination airport |
Kamina Airport , Congo-Kinshasa
|
| Passengers | 11 |
| crew | 3 |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
The air accident a Douglas DC-4 Air Congo took place on 29 November 1964. On that day, collided, a Douglas DC-4 (OO-DEP) , with a charter flight to Kamina should be performed when starting up from the airport Stanleyville on the Runway with an oil drum, which led to a loss of control and a crash. Six people were killed in the accident.
machine
The aircraft was a Douglas DC-4, built in 1944 during World War II at the Douglas Aircraft Company's plant in Long Beach , California and sold to the United States in 1944 with serial number 18384 , serial number DO148 and military aircraft registration number 43-17184 Army Air Forces (USAAF) was delivered. The machine was phased out in 1955 and sold to United Airlines , which operated the DC-4 with the aircraft registration number N30048 and the name Mainliner Olympic until November 1956. In the same month the machine went to Transocean Air Lines , where it remained in service until October 1959. Belgian International Air Services then received the machine and registered it with the OO-DEP label . The four-engine long - haul aircraft was equipped with four radial engines of the type Pratt & Whitney R-2000-2SD-13G Twin Wasp . By the time of the accident, the machine had completed a total of 48,113 operating hours.
Passengers and crew
Eleven passengers had taken the domestic charter flight from Stanleyville to Kamina. There was a three-person crew on board, consisting of a flight captain, a first officer and a flight engineer. No flight attendants were assigned for the flight. The 37-year-old flight captain had type ratings for the Douglas DC-4 and Douglas DC-6 and had a flying experience of 14,000 hours. The 31-year-old first officer held type ratings for the Douglas DC-4 and Douglas C-54 aircraft .
the accident
A domestic charter flight from Kamina to Stanleyville (today: Kisangani) and back was supposed to be carried out with the machine on that day. After the outward flight had been successfully completed, the take-off run from Stanleyville Airport began at 7:20 p.m. - and thus after dark. After the machine had rolled 900 meters, the flight captain suddenly saw an empty oil drum on the runway. He tried to avoid the barrel by braking abruptly with the wheels on the left side, letting the machine lurch to the left. The nose landing gear caught the barrel anyway. The nose of the aircraft took off at that moment. The machine had reached a speed at which it would have been possible to take off under normal circumstances. As a result of the collision with the landing gear, the oil drum was thrown up, fell onto the runway and jumped up again, whereupon the machine caught the drum with its right horizontal stabilizer. Part of the horizontal stabilizer was torn off and fell onto the runway, while the barrel was thrown from the runway down to one of the exits. The machine rolled on and was increasingly pushed to the right by the presumably completely deformed right horizontal stabilizer. The machine rotated and the crew immediately retracted the landing gear. After only 500 meters in the air, the machine, whose vertical controllability had been lost due to the damage to the horizontal stabilizer, fell to the ground with a pitch angle of 30 degrees. The accident occurred at the northern exit of runway 28, about 150 meters after the end of the runway. After the impact, the machine jumped up, fell to the ground again 50 meters further and then continued to slide on the underside of the fuselage. The machine finally skidded 90 degrees to the right, with the passengers who had been sitting in the rear area of the machine being thrown out of the DC-4 through the torn cargo door and the open cabin door. Immediately after the machine came to a standstill, a fire broke out. The machine was completely destroyed by the fire.
Accident investigation
It was found that the runway lighting had been extremely poor. Numerous lights had failed, some of them replaced by kerosene lamps. An examination of the buoyancy aids showed that they were in the 15 degrees position required for take-off and that the flight control cables were not damaged.
The seat position in the machine played an important role in the survival of the accident. Nine people who had been sitting in the rear part of the cabin were thrown from the machine. Although the occupants had suffered injuries of various degrees and one of the people later died in the hospital from severe burns, the remaining eight survivors were the only ones in the aircraft accident.
A large piece of the right stabilizer was found on the runway. This was badly deformed and showed impressions from a collision with a cylindrical object.
The collision of the machine with an empty oil drum during take-off was found to be the cause of the accident. The collision caused damage to the right horizontal stabilizer, which led to a loss of control.
The accident investigators found that the barrel was one of a series of oil drums that had been used to block the runway during the Congo crisis . After the crisis, when troops of the armed forces of Congo-Kinshasa took the airport and drove the rebels of the Gizenga government , the barrels were removed from the runway and deposited next to it. It was suspected that the keg was blown onto the runway by the exhaust jet of another machine that had previously taken off from the airport.
swell
- Crash of a Douglas DC-4 in Stanleyville: 6 killed , B3A - Bureau of Aircraft Accident Archives
- Accident report , ICAO Circular 82-AN / 69
- Accident report DC-4, OO-DEP in the Aviation Safety Network
- Operating history of the machine on rzjets.net