Air disaster in Königs Wusterhausen
| Air disaster in Königs Wusterhausen | |
|---|---|
 Memorial plaque in Wildau for the 60 victims of the crash who were buried here |
|
| Accident summary | |
| Accident type | crash |
| place |
52 ° 18 '23.3 " N , 13 ° 41' 19" E nearKönigs Wusterhausen |
| date | August 14, 1972 |
| Fatalities | 156 |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Injured | 0 |
| Aircraft | |
| Aircraft type | Ilyushin Il-62 |
| operator | Interflug |
| Mark | DM-SEA |
| Departure airport |
 Berlin Schönefeld Airport
|
| Destination airport |
.svg){kind=small} Burgas airport
|
| Passengers | 148 |
| crew | 8th |
| Lists of aviation accidents | |
During the plane disaster in Königs Wusterhausen on August 14, 1972, an Ilyushin Il-62 airliner of the Interflug crashed near the city of Königs Wusterhausen south of Berlin. There were 148 passengers and eight crew members on board, none of whom survived the crash. The aircraft lost its tail unit due to a fire in the rear , which led to the complete loss of stability and controllability of the aircraft.
At Interflug, the GDR's state airline, the crash was the first fatal accident, the most serious accident in its history and the most momentous aircraft disaster on German territory to date .
At that time it was the worst accident with an IL-62 . It was the world's second accident involving an Il-62 with fatalities.
procedure
The machine with the aircraft registration DM-SEA (factory number 00702), which was the first Il-62 to be put into service by Interflug in April 1970 and had completed around 3,520 flight hours before the crash, took off on August 14, 1972 at 4:29 pm from Berlin Schönefeld Airport . The destination was Burgas Airport in Bulgaria . The 51-year-old commander Heinz Pfaff has flown the Il-62 since its introduction at Interflug and had a total of 8100 flight hours with over four million flight kilometers, including as a pilot of the Il-14 and Il-18 . Other crew members were the copilot Lothar Walther with 6041 flight hours, navigator Achim Filenius (8570), who had survived the 1963 airplane accident near Königsbrück , flight engineer Ingolf Stein (2258) and four flight attendants .
About 100 kilometers from Berlin, near Cottbus , the crew noticed problems with the trimming of the horizontal stabilizer at a height of about 8,900 meters . At 4:44 p.m. the return to Berlin-Schönefeld was initiated after consultation with air traffic control. Seven minutes later, the crew let the fuel off ( rapid fuel dump) in order to avoid an overweight landing. During the descent , the tail with the elevator and vertical stabilizer detached itself from the aircraft. This led to the loss of stability and controllability of the aircraft. The machine tilted upside down and was exposed to heavy aerodynamic loads, as a result of which part of the front fuselage was still detached in the air. The debris hit around 5 p.m. near Königs Wusterhausen. A minute earlier, the pilots had informed the radio traffic about increasing problems with the altitude control in an emergency call.
root cause
According to the investigations, the cause of the crash was damage to the insulation of electrical cables caused by leaky hot air lines (with bleed air from the engine under overpressure at 300 ° C, in the "non-hermetic" and non-visible rear behind the cabin) of the air conditioning system a short circuit with arcing and ignition of magnesium alloys of the structure with temperatures of up to 2000 ° C occurred. The resulting sparks caused a fire in the cargo area at the stern. Due to the cable damage, there were already problems with trimming the elevator shortly after take-off. In addition, highly flammable deicing agent was stored in the affected rear cargo space , which ignited and developed a great deal of heat. The fire was not noticed by the crew as there were no fire alarms in the rear of the Il-62 at that time . Since there was also no line of sight from the cabin to the rear section, the crew was not aware of the extent of the technical problems. As a result of the fire, the stern section lost its structural stability and separated from the fuselage together with the entire tail unit. Then the fall took place from a height of several hundred meters, in which a part of the fuselage broke off at the front.
consequences
While the cause of the accident was being determined, Interflug's Il-62 was prohibited from flying. The investigation commission came to the conclusion that the leaky hot air ducts in the non-pressurized rear section had triggered the crash. The accident was therefore due to a design flaw, which, however, was never confirmed by OKB Ilyushin . As a result of these findings, the manufacturer made changes to the Il-62, including the installation of additional fire alarms and a viewing window in the partition wall to the rear area. In addition, additional periodic controls - so-called "special climate controls" - were ordered. In the further flight operations of the Il-62 no more problems of this kind occurred.
A memorial for the victims is located in the cemetery of the city of Wildau (district Hoherlehme), it is also a collective grave for the 60 victims named on the stone who could no longer be identified. In Königs Wusterhausen a memorial plaque near the crash site reminds of the accident.
Films / reports
- The death flight of the IL 62. A documentation of the series Forgotten Catastrophes of the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR) by Jens Stubenrauch and Titus Richter, 45 minutes; First broadcast in 1998
literature
- Edgar A. Haine: Disaster in the Air . Associated University Presses, New York 2000, ISBN 0-8453-4777-2 , pp. 123 .
- Jan-Arwed Richter, Christian Wolf: Fire on board! Aircraft accidents: backgrounds, causes and consequences . GeraMond , Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7654-7213-1 , p. 37 ff .
- Stuttering howl . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1972, p. 58 f . ( online ).
Web links
- Aircraft accident data and report in the Aviation Safety Network (English)
- Detailed description of the course of the accident on interflug.biz
- Image documents on the DM-SEA and from the crash site on if-interflug.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ 40 years ago: Crash near Königs Wusterhausen. Airliners.de, August 14, 2012, accessed June 24, 2016 .
- ^ Accident report IL-62 DM-SEA , Aviation Safety Network (English), accessed on August 25, 2018.
- ↑ Flieger Revue , 10/1972, p. 409
- ^ Karl-Dieter Seifert: Way and crash of the Interflug. The history of the company. VDM, Zweibrücken 2008, ISBN 978-3-86619-030-6 , p. 297
- ^ Detlef Billig, Manfred Meyer: Airplanes of the GDR. Volume 2. TOM Modellbau, Friedland 2002, ISBN 3-613-02241-9 , pp. 110–111
- ↑ Manfred Meyer: Airplanes in the GDR: Il-62 - The "white giant". In: Flieger Revue . 1/2000, p. 58
- ↑ Source: MDR report and inscription on the stone "Your final resting place was here"
- ^ Claus-Dieter Steyer: First memory after 40 years . In: Der Tagesspiegel , August 15, 2012, accessed on March 28, 2016.