A Russian charter jet filled with youngsters on a flight to Spain collided with a two-pilot cargo plane over southern Germany, scattering flaming wreckage over a wide area, officials and a travel agent said. No one aboard was believed to have survived.
The Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 from Moscow was bound for Barcelona when it hit a Boeing 757 from the DHL delivery service en-route from Bahrain to Brussels, Belgium, at an altitude of about 12 000 metres late on Monday, German officials said.
In Moscow, Bashkirian representative Sergei Rybanov said 47 children, 10 adults and 12 crew were aboard the Russian plane. All flew into Moscow on Saturday, but they missed their connection to Spain and asked the airline organise a special flight to Barcelona, he said on Tuesday.
Tatiana Ostapenko said her Moscow travel agency helped organise a group of 49 travellers for the flight – 44 children and five adults accompanying them. One adult worked for her Soglasiye Tourist company, she said.
”We are in shock,” Ostapenko said.
The planes came down near Ueberlingen on the northern shore of Lake Constance, which borders Switzerland and Austria. Police said burning wreckage was scattered over a stretch of 25 to 30 kilometres in an area of small towns and fields.
Witnesses said they heard a noise like thunder and saw a fireball erupt in the night sky, then watched three large pieces of wreckage plunge to Earth. Scattered fires broke out, but there were no casualties on the ground, authorities said.
The crash happened a few minutes after Swiss air traffic controllers took over both planes from their German colleagues ? a handover illustrating the fragmented nature of European airspace.
Swiss controllers asked the Russian plane’s pilot several times to descend without getting a reply. By the time he reacted, the cargo plane received an automatic cockpit warning that it was on a collision course and descended too, leading to the crash, said Anton Maag, a representative for Swiss controllers.
”The problem was that the Russian plane did not respond immediately,” Maag said in Zurich. ”The descent was begun very late. The double descent led to both planes flying at the same altitude and hitting each other.”
Investigators were hoping for more clues from the Tupolev’s flight data recorder, which was found overnight.
Hundreds of rescuers worked through the night locating wreckage and bodies, while helicopters equipped with infrared vision looked for plane and body parts. A strong stench of jet fuel hung over fields and the lakefront.
Axel Gietz, a DHL representative in Brussels, said the company’s plane went down in the collision, killing the British pilot, Paul Phillips, and his Canadian co-pilot, Brant Campioni.
Police initially spoke of up to 150 dead, based on the capacity of the Soviet-era plane, but later revised their estimates as information from Russia started coming in.
Police representative Wenzel said all aboard the two planes were presumed dead. ”At such an altitude, it would be a wonder if anyone survived,” he said.
Dirk Diestel (47) was changing his child’s diaper shortly before midnight when he looked up through a skylight and saw a huge fireball in the sky.
”Immediately I thought that something horrible had happened,” he said.
By daybreak, rescue workers had recovered 11 bodies from smoking wreckage after the two planes collided at 11:43 p.m. (2143 GMT).
The Russian plane was a charter flight, said a duty officer for Bashkirian Airlines at its headquarters in Ufa, the capital of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan in the southern Ural Mountains.
The airline has eight Tu-154s in its fleet of 39 Soviet-designed planes. It mainly serves Russia and former Soviet republics, with some charter flights to other destinations.
The three-engine Tu-154, first put into commercial service in 1972, is the workhorse of Russia’s domestic airlines and widely used throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as in China.
A Tu-154 crashed in the Siberian city of Irkutsk last July, killing all 143 aboard. Another crashed on takeoff from Irkutsk in 1994, killing 124 people. The plane reportedly was overloaded.
A Tu-154 belonging to China Southwest Airlines crashed in China in 1999, killing all 61 people aboard. A German-owned Tu-154 collided with a U.S. Air Force C-141 off the coast of Namibia in 1998, killing 33 people, and in 1997 a Tajik Tu-154 crashed en route to the United Arab Emirates, killing 85.
Collisions in the air between large aircraft are extremely rare, especially at the high cruising altitudes where Monday’s crash reportedly occurred. – Sapa-AP