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Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 was a Russian aircraft which collided with a DHL-owned cargo plane, on July 1, 2002 at 21:35 (UTC), near the German town of Überlingen, near Lake Constance.
The flights involvedThe Bashkirian Airlines plane was a Tupolev 154, travelling from Moscow to Barcelona carrying 57 passengers and 12 crew. Fifty-two of the passengers were Russian children, whose school had won them a trip to Spain. The DHL plane was a Boeing 757, travelling from Bergamo, Italy, to Brussels with two crewmembers aboard. The accident itselfThe two planes were flying at 36,000 feet, on a collision course. The air space, even though it lies in Germany, was controlled from Zürich by the private Swiss airspace control company Skyguide . The air-traffic controller was working two work stations at the same time and was late to realise the danger facing the two planes. However, less than a minute before the crash he did contact the Russian plane, instructing the pilot to descend by 1,000 feet to avoid collision with crossing traffic (i.e., the DHL Boeing). Seconds after the Russian crew initiated the descent, their TCAS collision avoidance system instructed them to climb, while at about the same time the TCAS on the DHL flight instructed that pilot to descend. Had both planes followed those instructions, the collision may not have occurred. The DHL pilot followed the TCAS instructions and initiated a descent, but the Russian pilot did not, continuing to obey the airspace control instructions. Unaware of the TCAS-issued alerts, the air-traffic controller at Zürich repeated his instruction to the Russian plane to descend, giving the crew incorrect information as to the position of the other plane. Precious seconds were lost as the Tupolev crew tried to locate the DHL flight visually in the dark, all the time following the ground control orders instead of those given by the collision avoidance system. Thus, both planes descended. The results were fatal. The planes collided at a right angle, and all 71 people were killed. Other factors in the crashOnly a single air-traffic controller, Peter Nielsen of ACC Zürich, was controlling the airspace the planes were in. His colleague had taken an unauthorized break, and he was apparently overburdened. Handling two workstations at once, he did not spot the danger until about a minute before impact. Had he ordered the Russian plane to descend earlier, the collision avoidance systems would never have issued any instructions. In addition, a ground based collision warning system, which would have alerted the controller to imminent collisions early, had been switched off for maintenance. Lastly, the phone lines at Skyguide were down, which prevented adjacent air-traffic controllers at Karlsruhe from phoning in a warning. Related eventsPeter Nielsen was stabbed to death in front of his home in Zürich on February 24, 2004. A Russian man, Vitaly Kaloyev, was arrested within a few days. Kaloyev had lost his wife and both of his children, who were aboard Bashkirian Airlines 2937. On May 19, 2004, the German federal aviation accident investigative office BFU made the results of their inquiry into the crash public. Skyguide, after initially having blamed the Russian pilot for the accident, accepted responsibility and has paid compensation to some of the Russian families. A criminal investigation of the Skyguide actions is ongoing as of May 2004. External links
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