July 1: On This Day in World History … briefly
The only air traffic controller handling the airspace, Peter Nielsen, was working two workstations at the same time. Partly due to the added workload and partly due to delayed radar data, he did not realise the problem in time and thus failed to keep the aircraft at a safe distance from each other.
2002: Midair collision kills all on board both planes
On the night of 1 July 2002, Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937, a Tupolev Tu-154 passenger jet, and DHL Flight 611, a Boeing 757 cargo jet, collided in mid-air over Überlingen, a southern German town on Lake Constance. All 69 passengers and crew aboard the Tupolev and the two crew members of the Boeing were killed.
The official investigation by the German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation identified as the main cause of the collision a number of shortcomings on the part of the Swiss air traffic control service in charge of the sector involved, and also ambiguities in the procedures regarding the use of TCAS, the on-board aircraft collision avoidance system.
A year and a half after the crash, on February 24, 2004, Peter Nielsen, the air traffic controller on duty at the time of the collision, was murdered in an apparent act of revenge by Vitaly Kaloyev, a Russian citizen who had lost his wife and two children in the accident.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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