It has been more than 13 years since that memorable date when two airliners collided in the sky over Germany - the Russian passenger TU-154M and the Belgian cargo Boeing-757. The victims of this terrible disaster were 71 people, most of them children.
Pre-flight events
On that fateful night from July 1 to July 2, 2002, when the disaster occurred over Lake Constance, there were 67 passengers on board the Russian passenger aircraft TU-154, which belonged to the Bashkir Airlines company, including 52 children and 12 crew members. The main part was made up of talented schoolchildren from Bashkiria who flew to Spain on vacation. Vouchers were provided by the UNESCO Committee of the Republic as an encouragement for high academic performance. And indeed, in this group, all the children were like a selection: artists, poets, athletes.
As it turned out later, Ufa schoolchildren were not supposed to be in the sky on that ill-fated night at all. Just by mistake, the adults who accompanied them, who brought a group of Bashkir children to Sheremetyevo Airport,instead of taking them to Domodedovo, they missed their plane to Barcelona the day before.
A series of accidents
Practically all children going on holidays abroad came from families of high-ranking parents. For example, 15-year-old Leysan Gimaeva was the daughter of the head of the presidential administration of the Bashkir Republic. If these were children from ordinary families, then they would simply return home, albeit upset, but alive, and the plane crash over Lake Constance would not have happened.
But the influential parents of schoolchildren decided to send one of the aircraft belonging to Bashkir Airlines to Moscow for them, which was then supposed to take them to Spain on a charter flight No. 2937. The crew of the aircraft was led by Alexander Gross, who had already flown to Barcelona several times before and knew the route well.
And here's another accident - after the children got on the plane, it turned out that there were still a few empty seats. It was immediately decided to sell these extra tickets. There were only seven of them. Four of them went to the Shislovsky family from Belarus, who also missed their plane, and three went to Svetlana Kaloeva from North Ossetia, who flew with her two children (eldest son Kostya and 4-year-old Diana) to her husband Vitaly, who worked in Spain under a contract. After the disaster over Lake Constance, even the names of these random passengers were not immediately known.
Before the disaster
To thatJuly night, both aircraft were in the sky over Germany, but despite this, air traffic control for that period was transferred to the Swiss company Skyguide, located in Zurich. In this center, as usual at night, only three people remained to work: two dispatchers and an assistant. However, almost before the collision, one of the people on duty left for a break, and only Peter Nielsen remained at the console, who was forced to monitor two terminals simultaneously. When the controller noticed that two planes, located at the same flight level of 36,000 feet, began to approach each other, there were already a few seconds left before the crash. A collision over Lake Constance was almost inevitable.
Team Mismatch
The courses of aircraft flying towards each other should have inevitably crossed. The controller tried to correct the situation and gave the command to the crew of the Russian liner to descend. It must be said that by this time the TU-154 pilots had already noticed another vessel approaching them from the left side. They were ready to perform a maneuver that would allow the planes to disperse safely.
Immediately after the dispatcher's command, the Russian pilots' cockpit came to life with an automatic warning of dangerous proximity (TCAS), which informed them that it was urgent to climb. And at the same time, on board the Boeing, the same instruction was received from an identical system, but only to descend. The co-pilot of the TU-154 aircraft drewthe attention of the rest of the crew to the discrepancy between the dispatcher and TCAS commands, but he was told that they would follow the order received from the ground. That is why no one confirmed the order received from the dispatcher, although the ship began to decline. Just a few seconds later, the command from the ground was repeated. This time, she was immediately confirmed.
Fateful mistake
As the investigation would later show, the collision over Lake Constance was due to an untimely command given by Skyguide dispatcher Peter Nielsen. By mistake, he gave the crew of the Russian plane incorrect information about another airliner, which is supposedly to their right.
Subsequently, deciphering the black box data showed that the pilots were misled by such a message and, apparently, decided that another aircraft was flying nearby, which the TCAS system for some reason did not detect. It remains unclear why none of the pilots informed about this contradiction in the commands of the dispatcher on duty.
Disaster over Lake Constance
At the same time as the Russian aircraft, the Boeing-757 was also descending, the crew of which was following the TCAS instructions. They immediately reported this maneuver to the ground, but the controller Peter Nielsen did not hear it, as another ship on a different frequency got in touch.
In the last moments before the crash, both crews did their best to preventdangerous approach, rejecting the steering wheels to the stop, but, as you know, all efforts were in vain. The Tu-154M plane collided with the Boeing-757 almost at a right angle. The plane belonging to the transport company DHL, with its vertical stabilizer, de alt a powerful blow to the fuselage of the Russian airliner, which caused it to fall apart in the air. Its fragments fell in the vicinity of the German town of Überlingen, near Lake Constance (Baden-Württemberg). The Boeing, in turn, having lost its stabilizer and lost control, crashed. A terrible disaster over Lake Constance claimed the lives of the crew members of both aircraft and all passengers flying on the Tu-154.
Investigation of what happened
According to the results of the crash, an investigation was carried out by a specially created commission under the German Federal Office (BFU). Her findings were published two years later. The commission's report gave two reasons for the collision:
- The air traffic controller failed to ensure proper separation between the two air liners in time. The descent instruction was handed over to the pilots of the Tu-154 crew late.
- The crew of the Russian plane continued to descend despite TCAS advice to climb.
Expert opinions
The report also pointed out numerous mistakes made by the leadership of the center in Zurich and ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). Thus, the owners of the Swiss company Skyguide for many years allowedsuch an order of work of air traffic controllers, in which only one person could control air traffic, while his partner rested at that time. The plane crash over Lake Constance (2002) made it clear that this number of personnel was clearly not enough. In addition, the equipment that was supposed to tell the dispatcher about the possible convergence of airliners was turned off that night due to maintenance.
As for the phones, they didn't work either. It was precisely because of this that Peter Nielsen could not at the right time get through to the airport located in Friedrichshafen (a small town located north of Lake Constance) in order to transfer control of the plane arriving with a delay to the controllers there, followed by the Swiss at the second terminal. In addition, due to the lack of telephone communication, the duty officers in Karlsruhe, who noticed a dangerous approach in the air much earlier, were unable to warn Nielsen of the impending disaster.
Also, the commission that investigated the collision over Lake Constance noted that the ICAO documents governing the use of TCAS and held by the crew of the Tu-154 aircraft were somewhat contradictory and incomplete. The fact is that, on the one hand, the instruction to the system contained a strict prohibition on performing maneuvers that did not correspond to TCAS prompts, and on the other hand, it was considered auxiliary, thus creating the impression that the dispatcher's commands were priority. From this we can draw the only correct conclusion: if it were not for a series of ridiculousaccidents and fatal mistakes, then the plane crash over Lake Constance (2002) would have been simply impossible.
Results
The tragedy did not end with the plane crash. Unfortunate relatives buried their children, and some families after that broke up, unable to withstand such grief. Many lives were taken by the disaster over Lake Constance. The death toll initially contained the names of 19 adults and 52 children. But on February 24, 2004, another name was added to it - Peter Nielsen, the same Skyguide dispatcher who made a number of mistakes that led to such a large-scale tragedy. He was killed by Vitaly Kaloev, whose wife and children flew on that ill-fated flight number 2937. The trial in this case lasted almost a year. At the end of October 2005, Kaloev was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 8 years in prison. Considering the circumstances of the case and the severe mental state of the accused, the court reduced the term to 5 years and 3 months.
Near the German city of Überlingen, in the area of Lake Constance, an unusual monument has been erected, reminiscent of the tragedy more than 10 years ago. It is made in the form of a torn necklace, whose pearls scattered along the entire trajectory of the fall of the wreckage of two airliners.
