Airline Disasters - and Near Misses by milton

All 229 people on board flight 111 died when this MD-11 crashed into St. Margaret’s Bay off the coast of Nova Scotia while trying to make an emergency landing at Halifax due to smoke in the cockpit shortly after takeoff from New York City on September 2, 1998. The crew were overcome by the fire which was believed to have originated in the electrical wiring of the in-flight entertainment system.

This Airbus A300 was shot down over the Strait of Hormuz by the guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers and crew on July 3, 1988. The crew of the Vincennes mistook flight 655 en route to Dubai for an enemy F14 and realized their unfortunate mistake only too late when they were called upon to help in the search for survivors.

A 20-year-long RCMP investigation failed to definitively identify those responsible for the bombing of flight 182, a 747 which exploded and crashed off the Irish coast en route to London from Montréal on June 23, 1985. All 329 passengers and crew were killed when the plane disintegrated in midair upon the explosion of a terrorist bomb packed in a Sanyo radio and checked onto the flight by a passenger who did not board the aircraft.

March 27, 1977 was aviation’s darkest day before September 11, 2001. Flight 4805, a 747 on a takeoff roll, collided with flight 1736, another 747 which was taxiing in the opposite direction down the same, foggy runway in Tenerife, Canary Islands, killing 583 people. All 248 people aboard the aircraft attempting to take off were killed, along with 335 people aboard the taxiing aircraft. 61 people on the struck aircraft, including the three members of the flight crew, survived. Name both Airlines.

This 747 exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after taking off from New York en route to Rome on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board. Coming as it did two days before the opening of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, the fate of flight 800 gave birth to many theories suggesting the aircraft had encountered a terrorist or a military response. In the end, the NTSB concluded that the explosion was likely caused by a static charge or short circuit in an almost-empty fuel tank which had been warmed to a dangerous level as the aircraft sat on the tarmac in New York in the hot summer sun.

Flight 191 crashed just beyond the end of the runway when one of the DC-10’s engines dislodged and fell to the ground during takeoff. The subsequent damage to the wing, combined with an airspeed reduction commanded by the crew as recommended by the engine-out procedures at that time, caused the aircraft to suffer a unilateral stall during takeoff from Chicago en route to Los Angeles on May 25, 1979. All 271 people on the aircraft were killed along with six people on the ground.

Flight 447 disappeared from radar in the middle of the Atlantic ocean en route to Paris from Rio de Janiero on June 1, 2009 with the loss of all 228 people on board. Incredibly, it was determined that despite the A330 having fully functional engines and avionics and plenty of fuel, the pilots flew the aircraft into an aerodynamic stall from which they never recovered due to malfunctioning airspeed indicators and a consequent cascade of confusing indicators from the onboard computers.

Over 36 years later, much of this DC-10 remains on Mount Erebus in Antarctica where it ended its ill-fated flight on November 28, 1979. All 257 people on board the sightseeing flight were killed when the inattentive pilots, believing themselves to be in a different location away from the mountain, flew too low and collided with it six seconds after realizing their error.

Despite a losing all hydraulic power and therefore all ability to manipulate the flight controls (rudder, elevators, ailerons, flaps) following a midair uncontained failure of the tail-mounted #2 engine, the crew of this DC-10 en route to Chicago from Denver managed to guide the plane to a fiery crash landing at Sioux City airport on July 19, 1989, killing 111 of those aboard. A DC-10 instructor who was a passenger on the flight assisted the crew by delicately varying the thrust on each of the two remaining engines, enabling them to reach the runway and preserve 185 lives.

39 People on the ground, as well as all four people on this cargo 747, were killed when the crew of flight 1862 lost control and collided with a block of apartments while trying to return to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam after both engines on the right wing became detached shortly after takeoff on October 4, 1992.

All 306 people aboard survived when the Captain of this Airbus A330 successfully landed flight 236 at a military airport in the Azores islands after an unpowered 65 nautical mile glide following a twin engine flameout due to a mid-Atlantic fuel starvation en route to Lisbon from Toronto on August 24, 2001. The aircraft had developed a fuel leak on one side of the aircraft, and the crew had responded to the consequent imbalance indicators by opening cross-feed valves, thus sending fuel from the sound side to the leaking one.

Flight 103 was en route to New York from London when an explosion from a terrorist bomb brought this 747 down over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 people on board as well as 11 people on the ground. 11 years later two men were tried and one convicted and jailed for planting the bomb in a trial by a Scottish court at a military base in the Netherlands.