LOT flight 007

LOT flight 007
	The plane involved in the accident in January 1979 at John F. Kennedy International Airport .
Accident summary
Accident type	Loss of control after an engine explosion
place	Warsaw , Poland Coordinates: 52 ° 11 ′ 5.1 ″ N , 20 ° 56 ′ 59.1 ″ E
date	March 14, 1980
Fatalities	87
Survivors	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Ilyushin Il-62
operator	LOT
Mark	SP-LAA
Passengers	77
crew	10
	Lists of aviation accidents

An Ilyushin Il-62 of the Polish airline Polskie Linie Lotnicze LOT had an accident on March 14, 1980 on LOT flight 007 in Warsaw in the immediate vicinity of the capital's airport in Okęcie when approaching. All 87 people on board died.

Flight and airplane

Flight LO 007 was a transatlantic flight of the Polish airline LOT from New York “ John F. Kennedy International Airport ” (JFK / KJFK) to Warsaw's Okęcie Airport (WAW / EPWA). The connection existed since April 16, 1972.

The aircraft involved in the accident was a four-engined Ilyushin Il-62 built in 1971, the first Il-62 that LOT had acquired for transatlantic flights. The machine was christened " Mikołaj Kopernik ", the aircraft registration was SP-LAA, and the crew consisted of 10 people.

As planned, the plane should have left Kennedy Airport on March 13 at 7:00 p.m. (New York time). Due to a heavy snowstorm, the start could only be started at 21:18. After a nine-hour flight, which had hitherto been problem-free, the plane reached the Polish capital at 11:13 a.m. (Warsaw local time).

accident

During the approach, the crew reported the failure of the undercarriage light indicator to airport control. Since it was not clear whether the landing gear was extended for landing, the crew decided to abort the landing and overflight in order to allow the flight engineer to check the electrical system and the status of the landing gear - a common procedure in such cases. A few seconds after this announcement, instead of climbing, the machine sagged sharply and about 30 seconds later its right wing brushed trees in a small wood north of the icy moat of the former Warsaw Fort VI ("Okęcie") . At a speed of 380 km / h and a sink angle of 20 degrees, it fell into the approximately three-meter-deep trench, which is about one kilometer west of the airport runway.

In the collision with trees and the impact on the fortress foundation, the aircraft was badly damaged and partially sank in the mud of the trench.

Victim

Since the deep mud made it difficult to find parts of the wreck and thus to reconstruct the accident exactly, the water in the trench was drained.

All 77 passengers and the ten crew members were killed in the crash. The victims of the accident included the Polish singer Anna Jantar , the American ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam and six Polish students who had participated in an AIESEC conference in New York. In addition, a group of American amateur boxers who were supposed to compete in two boxing tournaments against Polish and Soviet boxers in Krakow and Katowice were on board with their supervisors. A member of the team was also the American light welterweight champion, Lemuel Steeples . The crew members who were killed in the accident included the flight captain Paweł Lipowczan and the first officer Tadeusz Łochocki.

nationality	Passengers	crew	total
Poland Poland	42	10	52
United States United States	28	0	28
Soviet Union Soviet Union	4th	0	4th
Germany Democratic Republic 1949 German Democratic Republic	3	0	3
total	77	10	87

Cause of accident

The scene of the accident was immediately cordoned off and the two flight recorders (cockpit calls, flight data recorder) were quickly found. However, the recordings stopped 26 seconds before the impact. After assembling the Kuznetsov NK-8 turbojet engines, it was found that turbine No. 2 had already been destroyed before the impact. The turbine disk of this engine was found - broken into individual parts - around four kilometers from the scene of the accident. Investigations of these fragments indicated material fatigue. The reconstruction of the cockpit processes showed that the fuel supply to engines 2 and 3 was switched off, while engine 4 (far right) was set to full thrust. Presumably, material defects in turbine 2 had led to the disintegration of this engine into its individual parts, which subsequently damaged two other engines and the control of elevator and rudder not far from the attachment point of the tail fin. The sudden loss of thrust and steering of the machine had led to the catastrophic drop in the low altitude, which led to the impact almost half a minute after the defect occurred.

According to the Polish commission investigating the accident, the crash was due to material, production and construction errors. According to an article on the 30th anniversary of the disaster in the Polish magazine Newsweek , records in the Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) indicate that pressure from authorities in the People's Republic of Poland has forced LOT to reduce aircraft maintenance costs and overload its engines. The turbine disc found showed signs of improper repair attempts by LOT ground staff. Flight experts reported doubts about the correctness of the article.

Street sign for a street named after the captain at the scene of the accident

Memorials

Memorial stone at the site of the accident at Warsaw Fort VI ("Okęcie")

At the site of the accident (on the northern bank of the moat) a memorial stone was placed on which the Polish primate , Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński , commemorated the victim in prayer.

A bronze memorial on which a dejected boxer lies was erected in front of the Warsaw sports club SKRA on Wawelska Street. The names of the deceased amateur boxers and their supervisors from the USA are engraved on it. An identical memorial was erected on the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs . The two monuments were funded by Thomas Kane and the International Amateur Boxing Association AIBA and created by the American artist Auldwin Thomas Schonberg .

The graves of the flying personnel of the "Kopernik" are in the Warsaw Powązki Military Cemetery . Anna Jantar was buried in the Wawrzyszew cemetery.

The captain Pawel Lipowczan was credited with deliberately crashing the machine in front of the uninhabited fort, thus sparing a nearby residential area, the neighboring six-lane Krakowska Alley and the juvenile prison. A small street near the scene of the accident was therefore named after him in 1990.

gallery

Place of the crash: moat of Fort VI
Crew graves at Powązki Military Cemetery
Memorial to the Victims on Wawelska Street
Memorial plaque to the captain

Web links

Commons : 1980 LOT 007 crash - Collection of images, videos and audio files

photos

Individual evidence

↑ The American Alan Parkhurst Merriam (1923-1980) was a music ethnologist in the second half of the 20th century. His most important work was "The Anthropology of Music"
↑ according to Article Niewygodna prawda ( memento of January 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) of March 7, 2010 in the Polish online edition of Newsweek (in Polish)
^ Sportowego Klubu Robotniczo-Akademickiego
↑ Managing Director of the former Printon Kane and Company (private equity fund and investment brokerage)
↑ according to Article Polish Boxing Federation Commemorates 1980 Crash Victims on the AIBA website (in English)

[1] The American Alan Parkhurst Merriam (1923-1980) was a music ethnologist in the second half of the 20th century. His most important work was "The Anthropology of Music"

[2] rding to Article Niewygodna prawda ( memento of January 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) of March 7, 2010 in the Polish online edition of Newsweek (in Polish)

[3] Sportowego Klubu Robotniczo-Akademickiego

[4] Managing Director of the former Printon Kane and Company (private equity fund and investment brokerage)

[5] rding to Article Polish Boxing Federation Commemorates 1980 Crash Victims on the AIBA website (in English)