Überlingen mid-air collision

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Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937
DHL Flight 611
Accident summary
Date 1 July 2002 (2002-07)
Summary Mid-air collision
involving ATC/crew/training error
Site Überlingen, Germany
47°46′42″N 9°10′26″E / 47.77833°N 9.17389°E / 47.77833; 9.17389Coordinates: 47°46′42″N 9°10′26″E / 47.77833°N 9.17389°E / 47.77833; 9.17389
Total fatalities 71 (all)
Total survivors 0
First aircraft

RA-85816, the aircraft involved in the accident, seen here at Stuttgart Airport in 1997.
Type Tupolev Tu-154M
Operator Bashkirian Airlines
Registration RA-85816
Flight origin Domodedovo Int'l Airport[BFU 1][1]
Moscow, Russia
Destination Barcelona Int'l Airport
Barcelona, Spain
Passengers 60 (including 45 children)
Crew 9
Fatalities 69 (all)
Survivors 0
Second aircraft

G-BIKP, similar to the accident aircraft, seen here at Frankfurt Airport in 2003.
Type Boeing 757-23APF[2]
Operator DHL
Registration A9C-DHL
Flight origin Bahrain Int'l Airport[3][4]
Stopover Orio al Serio Airport
Bergamo, Italy
Destination Brussels Airport
Brussels, Belgium
Passengers 0
Crew 2
Fatalities 2 (all)
Survivors 0
Site of the crash
The crash occurred at approximately 47° 46′ 42″ N, 9° 10′ 26″ E.
Memorial tablet „Die zerrissene Perlenkette“.
Memorial tablet.
Überlingen memorial.

The Überlingen mid-air collision occurred at 23:35 UTC on 1 July 2002 between Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 (a Tupolev Tu-154M passenger jet carrying 60 passengers – mostly children – and 9 crew) and DHL Flight 611 (a Boeing 757-23APF cargo jet manned by two pilots) over the towns of Überlingen and Owingen in southern Germany. All 71 people on board the two aircraft were killed.[5]

On 24 February 2004, Peter Nielsen, the air traffic controller on duty at the time of the accident, was stabbed to death by an architect, Vitaly Kaloyev,[6] who had lost his wife and two children in the accident.[7][8] On 19 May 2004, the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation (BFU) published its determination that the accident had been caused by shortcomings in the Swiss air traffic control system supervising the flights at the time of the accident and by ambiguities in the use of TCAS, the on-board aircraft collision avoidance system.[BFU 1]

Flights involved

Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 was a chartered flight from Moscow, Russia to Barcelona, Spain, carrying sixty passengers and nine crew. Forty-five of the passengers were Russian schoolchildren from the city of Ufa in Bashkortostan on a school trip organized by the local UNESCO committee to the Costa Daurada area of Spain.[1][3][9][10] Most of the parents of the children were high-ranking officials in Bashkortostan, Russia.[11] One of the fathers was the head of the local UNESCO committee.[12] The aircraft, a Tupolev Tu-154M registered as RA-85816, was piloted by a Russian crew. The 52-year-old captain Alexander Mihailovich Gross (Александр Михайлович Гросс) and the 40-year-old first officer Oleg Pavlovich Grigoriev (Олег Павлович Григорьев) flew the Tupolev. Grigoriev, the chief pilot of Bashkirian Airlines, used the trip to evaluate Gross's performance. 41-year-old Murat Ahatovich Itkulov (Мурат Ахатович Иткулов), normally the first officer, did not officially serve on duty because of this. The crew valued the opinions and guidance of Itkulov, who was slated to be promoted to captain. 50-year-old Sergei Kharlov, a navigator, and Flight Engineer Oleg Valeev joined the three pilots.[13]

DHL Flight 611, a Boeing 757-23APF cargo aircraft registered as A9C-DHL, had originated in Bahrain and was being flown by two Bahrain-based[3][14] pilots, 47-year-old British captain Paul Phillips and 34-year-old Canadian first officer Brant Campioni.[10] At the time of the accident, it was en route from Bergamo, Italy to Brussels, Belgium.

Accident

The two aircraft were flying at flight level 360 (36,000 feet, 10,973 m) on a collision course. Despite being over Germany, the airspace was controlled from Zürich, Switzerland, by the private Swiss airspace control company Skyguide. The only air traffic controller handling the airspace, Peter Nielsen, was working two workstations at the same time. He did not realize the problem in time and thus failed to keep the aircraft at a safe distance from each other. Only less than a minute before the accident did he realize the danger and contacted Flight 2937, instructing the pilot to descend by a thousand feet to avoid collision with crossing traffic (Flight 611). Seconds after the Russian crew initiated the descent, however, their traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) instructed them to climb, while at about the same time the TCAS on Flight 611 instructed the pilots of that aircraft to descend. Had both aircraft followed those automated instructions, it is likely that the collision would not have occurred.[BFU 1]

Flight 611's pilots on the Boeing jet initially followed the TCAS instructions and initiated a descent, but could not immediately inform the controller due to the fact that he was dealing with Flight 2937. About eight seconds before the collision, Flight 611's descent rate was about 2,400 feet per minute (12 m/s), not as rapid as the 2,500 to 3,000 ft/min (13 to 15 m/s) range advised by TCAS. The Russian pilot on the Tupolev disregarded the TCAS instruction to climb and instead began to descend, as instructed by the controller, thus both planes were now descending.[BFU 1]

Unaware of the TCAS-issued alerts, Nielsen repeated his instruction to Flight 2937 to descend, giving the Tupolev crew incorrect information as to the position of the DHL plane. Maintenance work was being carried out on the main radar system, which meant that the controllers were forced to use a slower system.[BFU 1]

The aircraft collided at almost a right angle at an altitude of 34,890 feet (10,630 m), with the Boeing's vertical stabilizer slicing completely through Flight 2937's fuselage just ahead of the Tupolev's wings. The Tupolev exploded and broke into several pieces, scattering wreckage over a wide area. The nose section of the aircraft fell vertically, while the tail section with the engines continued, stalled, and fell. As the nose section of the Tupolev fell at such speed, the flight deck crew soon lost consciousness. The crippled Boeing, now with 80% of its vertical stabilizer lost, struggled for a further seven kilometres (four miles) before crashing into a wooded area close to the village of Taisersdorf at a 70-degree downward angle. Each engine ended up several hundred metres away from the main wreckage, and the tail section was torn from the fuselage by trees just before impact. All 69 people on the Tupolev, and the two on board the Boeing, died.[BFU 1]

Other factors in the crash

Only one air traffic controller, Peter Nielsen of ACC Zurich, was controlling the airspace through which the aircraft were flying. The other controller on duty was resting in another room for the night. This was against the regulations, but had been a common practice for years and was known and tolerated by management. Due to maintenance work, Nielsen had a stand-by controller and system manager on call. Nielsen was unaware of this.[BFU 2] When Nielsen realised that the situation had subtly increased beyond his span of control, it was too late to summon assistance.

In the minutes before the accident, Nielsen was occupied with an Airbus on a delayed Aero Lloyd, Flight 1135, approaching Friedrichshafen Airport.[BFU 3] Handling two workstations at once, Nielsen struggled with the malfunctioning phone system that he was trying to use to call the Friedrichshafen airport to announce the approaching Aero Lloyd. The main phone lines at Skyguide were down due to maintenance work, and the backup line was defective. This caused Nielsen to spend more time than he anticipated coordinating the Airbus' late arrival into Friedrichshafen, and to miss several calls from aircraft. The faulty phone lines also prevented adjacent air traffic controllers at Karlsruhe from phoning in a warning. Due to these distractions he did not spot the danger until about a minute before impact. Had he been aware of the dangerous situation earlier, he could have kept the aircraft at a safe distance from each other. They would have been separated and their collision avoidance systems would not have issued instructions.

Additionally, after Nielsen instructed the Russian crew to descend, he returned to the situation with the Airbus bound for Friedrichshafen, and did not hear the DHL aircraft report of its TCAS descent.

Another factor was that the ground-based optical collision warning system, which would have alerted the controller to imminent collisions early, had been switched off for maintenance; Nielsen was unaware of this. There still was an aural STCA warning system, which released a warning addressed to workstation RE SUED at 21:35:00 (32 seconds before the collision); this warning was not heard by anyone present at that time, although no error in this system could be found in a subsequent technical audit; whether this audible warning is turned on or not, is not logged technically. Even if Nielsen had heard this warning, at that time finding a useful resolution order by the air traffic controller is impossible.[BFU 4]

Deviating statements in the official report

All countries involved could add additional "deviating" statements to the official report. The Kingdom of Bahrain, Switzerland and the Russian Federation did submit positions that were published with the official report. The USA did not submit deviating positions. The comments were published as an appendix to the report but were not commented upon by the German federal investigators.[15]

The statement by the Kingdom of Bahrain, the home country of the DHL plane, mostly agrees with the findings of the report. It says that the report should have put less emphasis on the actions of individuals and stressed the problems with the organisation and management more. Bahrain's statement also mentions the lack of crew resource management in the Tupolev's cockpit as a factor in the crash.[15]

The Russian Federation states that the Russian pilots were unable to obey the TCAS advisory to climb; the advisory was given when they were already at 35500 feet while the controller wrongly stated there was conflicting traffic above them at 36000 feet. Also, the controller gave the wrong position of the DHL plane (2 o'clock instead of the actual 10 o'clock). Russia asserts that the DHL crew had a "real possibility" to avoid a collision since they were able to hear the conversation between the Russian crew and the controller.[15]

Switzerland notes that the Tupolev was about 33 metres below the flight level ordered by the Swiss controller, and still descending at 1900 feet per minute. The Swiss say that this was also a cause of the accident. The Swiss position also states that in spite of the false information given (position and phraseology) by the Swiss controller the TCAS advisories would have been useful if obeyed immediately.[15]

The change in magnetic bearing of the Russian aircraft by cumulatively 20 degrees (from 254 to 274) during the upcoming conflict is not assessed in the official report.

Consequences

Skyguide memorial to the aviation accident and murder of Peter Nielsen.

Nielsen needed medical attention due to traumatic stress caused by the accident.[16] At Skyguide, his former colleagues maintained a vase with a white rose over Nielsen's former workstation.[17] Skyguide, after initially having blamed the Russian pilot for the accident, accepted its share of the responsibility and asked relatives of the victims for forgiveness.[18] On 19 May 2004, the official investigators found that managerial incompetence and systems failures were the main cause for the accident.

On 27 July 2006, a court in Konstanz decided that the Federal Republic of Germany should pay compensation to Bashkirian Airlines. The court found that it was illegal for the state to allow a foreign private company to provide air traffic control in German airspace. The government appealed the ruling, and a final decision is still pending as of 2008.[19]

In another case before the court in Konstanz, Skyguide's liability insurance is suing Bashkirian Airlines for 2.5 million euro in damages. The case was opened in March 2008; the legal questions are expected to be difficult, as the airline has filed for bankruptcy under Russian law.[19]

A criminal investigation of Skyguide began as of May 2004. On 7 August 2006, a Swiss prosecutor filed manslaughter charges against eight employees of Skyguide. The Winterthur prosecutor called for prison terms of 6 to 15 months, alleging "homicide by negligence".[20] The verdict was announced in September 2007. Three of the four managers convicted were given suspended prison terms and the fourth was ordered to pay a fine. Another four employees of the Skyguide firm were cleared of any wrongdoing.[21]

TCAS and conflicting orders

The accident raised questions on how pilots must react when they receive conflicting orders from the TCAS and from air traffic control (ATC). The TCAS is programmed to assume that both crews will promptly follow the system's instructions. The operations manual clearly states that TCAS should always take precedence over any ATC commands: "If an instruction to manoeuvre is received simultaneously from an RA (resolution advisory, the command issued by the TCAS) and from ATC, the advice given by RA should be followed."[BFU 1]

It is not required to notify the ATC prior to responding to an RA. This manoeuvre does not require any ATC clearance since TCAS takes into account the position of all other aircraft with transponders in the surrounding area.[citation needed]

Prior incidents

About a year before the Bashkirian Airlines-DHL collision there had already been another incident involving confusion between conflicting TCAS and ATC commands. During the 2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident, two Japanese airliners nearly collided with each other in Japanese skies. Both aircraft had received conflicting orders from the TCAS and ATC; one pilot followed the instructions of the TCAS while the other did not. A collision was only averted because one of the pilots made evasive maneuvers based on a visual judgement. The aircraft missed each other by less than 100 metres (330 ft), and the abrupt maneuver necessary to avert disaster left about 100 occupants hurt on one aircraft, some seriously. As a consequence Japan called for measures to prevent similar incidents. However, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) did not take action until after the crash over Germany.[22] In addition four near misses in Europe occurred before the German disaster, because one set of pilots obeyed the air traffic controllers while the other obeyed TCAS. The ICAO decided to fulfill Japan's request 18 months after the Japan Airlines incident.[13]

Unclear instructions for the Bashkirian Airlines crew

The pilots of Bashkirian Airlines were using the Tu-154 Flight Operations Manual, which contained a section that emphasizes the role of the ATC and describes the TCAS as an additional aid:[BFU 5]

“ For the avoidance of in-flight collisions is the visual control of the situation in the airspace by the crew and the correct execution of all instructions issued by the Air Traffic Controller to be viewed as the most important tool. TCAS is an additional instrument which ensures the timely determination of oncoming traffic, the classification of the risk and, if necessary, planning of an advice for a vertical avoidance manoeuvre. ”

—TU154M Flight Operations Manual

The same flight manual, on a different page, also contains a passage that strictly forbids manoeuvers contrary to the TCAS under any circumstances. Nevertheless, the official investigation found that the pilots seemed unaware that the TCAS RA should take precedence.[BFU 6]

Technical solutions

Before this accident a change proposal (CP 112)[23] for the TCAS II system had been issued. This proposal would have created a "reversal" of the original warning – asking the DHL plane to climb and the Tupolev crew to descend. According to an analysis by Eurocontrol this would have avoided the collision if the DHL crew had followed the new instructions and the Tupolev had continued to descend.[BFU 7]

Additionally, an automatic downlink for the TCAS – which would have alerted the air traffic controller – had not been deployed worldwide at the time of the accident.[BFU 8]

Recommendations after the accident

The investigation report contains a number of recommendations concerning TCAS, calling for upgrades and for better training and clearer instructions to the pilots.[BFU 1]

Notable passengers on Flight 2937

Fourteen-year old Kirill Degtyarev created paintings from age 4 to his death and had held two public exhibitions. After his death, Ufa hosted one exhibition and Überlingen hosted another exhibition.[13] The family of future deputy North Ossetian housing minister Vitaly Kaloyev all died. Kaloyev would later go on to murder Nielsen.

Murder of Peter Nielsen

Main article: Vitaly Kaloyev

Devastated by the loss of his family, Vitaly Kaloyev held Peter Nielsen responsible for their deaths. He stabbed Nielsen to death at his home in Kloten, near Zürich, on 24 February 2004.[17][24] Police arrested Kaloyev at a local motel not long after the murder, and he was subsequently convicted of the crime in 2005. He was released on 8 November 2007 because his mental condition was not sufficiently considered in the initial sentence. After his release, Kaloyev was dubbed a "hero" in North Ossetia. In January 2008, he was appointed deputy construction minister of North Ossetia.[25]

Dramatization

The Discovery Channel Canada documentary series Mayday featured this accident in the episode titled Deadly Crossroads, which was released in 2004.[26]

The National Geographic Channel documentary series Seconds From Disaster featured this mid-air collision in the episode entitled Collision at 35,000 feet release in 26 September 2011.

"Flug in die Nacht – Das Unglück von Überlingen" (2009), ("Flight into the night – the accident at Überlingen") produced by German and Swiss TV stations SWR and SF, is a motion picture based on the crash and the subsequent killing of the air traffic controller.[27]

Related Articles

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Gallagher, Paul (9 July 2002). "Jet pilot's 14 seconds dilemma before fatal crash". The Scotsman (Edinburgh). Archived from the original on 19 January 2008. Retrieved 18 January 2007. 
  2. ↑ "A9C-DHL DHL International Boeing 757-23APF - cn 24635 / ln 258 - Planespotters.net". planespotters.net. Archived from the original on 11 October 2008. Retrieved 6 September 2008. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Vain attempt to avert deadly crash". CNN. 2 July 2002. Retrieved 9 April 2010. 
  4. ↑ "Mid-air collision of 1 July 2002: sequence of events" (Skyguide).
  5. ↑ "Passenger List". Archived from the original on 29 October 2008. Retrieved 21 November 2008. 
  6. ↑ Boyes, Roger (26 October 2005). "Father killed air traffic chief over fatal crash". The Sunday Times (London). Retrieved 28 December 2010. 
  7. ↑ Wolfsteller, Pilar (26 October 2005). "Father 'saw black' as he killed air traffic controller". The Scotsman (Edinburgh). Archived from the original on 19 January 2008. Retrieved 18 January 2007. 
  8. ↑ Harding, Luke; Nick Paton Walsh (28 February 2004). "Nothing left to lose: grief-crazed murder suspect haunted by family's air deaths". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 8 April 2008. 
  9. ↑ Koïchiro Matsuura (3 July 2002). "Address by Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, on receiving the International Prize of St Andrew for promoting dialogue among civilizations" (PDF (12KiB)). UNESCO. Retrieved 9 April 2010. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Wild, Matthew. "Family devastated by pilot's death". North Shore News. Retrieved 18 January 2007. 
  11. ↑ "Children's holiday party on doomed plane." CNN. 4 July 2002. Retrieved on 28 April 2010.
  12. ↑ http://www.newsru.com/world/02jul2002/aviacrash.html
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 "Deadly Crossroads," Mayday
  14. ↑ "British pilot 'tried to avert disaster'". BBC. 2 July 2002. Archived from the original on 6 May 2008. Retrieved 8 April 2008. 
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 "Appendices/Deviating positions for Investigation Report AX001-1-2/02 MAY 2004" (PDF). Retrieved 5 May 2008. 
  16. ↑ "Air crash safety device switched off". BBC NEWS. 3 July 2002. Retrieved 14 July 2009. 
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 "Information regarding the air accident at Überlingen on 1 July 2002". Skyguide. Retrieved 14 July 2009. 
  18. ↑ "Plane crash killing trial starts". BBC News. 25 October 2005. Retrieved 8 April 2008. 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Katastrophe von Überlingen – Flugunglück beschäftigt Landgericht". Stuttgarter Zeitung. 20 April 2008. Retrieved 7 June 2009. 
  20. ↑ "Swiss go on trial over air crash". BBC. 15 May 2007. Retrieved 15 May 2007. 
  21. ↑ "Four guilty over Swiss air crash". BBC. 4 September 2007. Retrieved 8 April 2008. 
  22. ↑ "report outline". ICAO. Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 22 January 2007. 
  23. ↑ Change proposal CP112E
  24. ↑ "Swiss air crash controller killed." CNN. Wednesday 25 February 2004. Retrieved on 29 January 2010.
  25. ↑ Franchetti, Mark (10 February 2008). "Russia hails Vitaly Kaloyev a hero". The Sunday Times (London). Retrieved 10 March 2009. 
  26. ↑ IMDb
  27. ↑ Flug in die Nacht – Das Unglück von Überlingen at the Internet Movie Database

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