It's 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. Victims of this terrible disaster were 71 people, most of whom are children.
On that fateful night from 1 to 2 July 2002, whenThere was a catastrophe over the Lake Constance, 67 passengers were onboard the Russian TU-154 passenger airliner belonging to the Bashkir Airlines company, including 52 children and 12 crew members. The main part was made by talented schoolchildren from Bashkiria, who flew to Spain for vacation. The vouchers were provided by the Committee for UNESCO Affairs of the Republic as a reward for high academic performance. And indeed, in this group all the children were like picking: artists, poets, sportsmen.
As it turned out later, Ufa schoolchildren in generalshould not have been in the sky on that ill-fated night. Just by mistake, the adults accompanying them, who brought a group of Bashkir children to Sheremetyevo airport, instead of delivering them to Domodedovo, they were late on their flight to Barcelona.
Almost all children going on vacation forborder, were descendants of 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 they were children from ordinary families, they would just go back home, albeit upset, but alive, and the plane crash above the Lake Constance would not have happened.
But influential parents of schoolchildren decided to sendfor them to Moscow one of the aircraft belonging to the Bashkir Airlines, which then was to charter them to Spain. The crew of the aircraft was headed by Alexander Gross, who had already flown to Barcelona several times before, and knew the route well.
And here's another accident - after the childrenboarded the plane, it turned out that there were still several vacant seats. Immediately it was decided to implement these extra tickets. There were only seven of them. Four of them went to the Shislovskys family from Belarus, who were also late for their plane, and three - Svetlana Kaloyeva from North Ossetia, flying with her two children (the eldest son of Kostya and 4-year-old Diana) to her husband Vitaly, who worked in Spain on contract. After the disaster over the Lake Constance, even the names of these random passengers became known not immediately.
That July night, both planes were in the skyover Germany, but in spite of this, the air traffic management 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 just before the collision, one of the people on duty left for a break, and behind the control panel there was only Peter Nielsen, who was forced to watch simultaneously two terminals. When the dispatcher noticed that two planes in the same echelon of 36,000 feet began to approach each other, there were already seconds before the disaster. The collision over the Lake Constance was almost inevitable.
Courses of airplanes flying towards each otherfriend, were to inevitably cross. The dispatcher tried to correct the situation and gave the command to the crew of the Russian airliner for a decrease. I must say that by this time the pilots TU-154 have already noticed another vessel approaching them from the left side. They were ready to carry out a maneuver that would allow the aircraft safely to disperse.
Immediately after the dispatcher's command in the cockpitRussian pilots came to life with an automatic system warning of dangerous approaches (TCAS), which informed that it is necessary to urgently gain altitude. At the same time aboard the "Boeing" the same instruction was received from the identical system, but only to decrease. The second pilot of the TU-154 aircraft drew the attention of the rest of the crew to the discrepancy between the dispatcher and TCAS commands, but he was told that they would carry out the order received from the ground. That's why no one confirmed the order received from the dispatcher, although the ship began to decline. After only a few seconds the team from the ground repeated. This time it was immediately confirmed.
As the investigation will later show, a clash overThe Lake of Constance was due to a timed command given by Peter Nilsen, the Skygate dispatcher. By mistake, he told the crew of the Russian plane the wrong information about another airliner, which allegedly is on their right.
Subsequently, the decoding of the data of the black boxesshowed that the pilots were misled by such a message and, apparently, decided that next to fly another aircraft, which the TCAS system for some reason did not find. It remains unclear why none of the pilots informed about this contradiction in the commands of the dispatcher on duty.
Simultaneously with the Russian aircraft,"Boeing-757", the crew of which carried out the instruction TCAS. About this maneuver they immediately reported to the ground, but the dispatcher Peter Nielsen did not hear him, because another vessel came out on a different frequency.
In the last moments before the catastrophe, bothcrew as they could, tried to prevent a dangerous rapprochement, turning the controls to the limit, but, as you know, all efforts were in vain. The Tu-154M aircraft collided with the Boeing 757 almost at right angles. The airplane belonging to the transport company DHL, with its vertical stabilizer, dealt a powerful blow to the fuselage of the Russian airliner, causing it to fall apart in the air. His wreckage fell in the vicinity of the German town of Uberlingen, near Lake Constance (Baden-Württemberg land). Boeing, in turn, lost the stabilizer and lost control, crashed. A terrible catastrophe over the Lake Constance took the lives of the crew members of both aircraft and all the passengers flying to the Tu-154.
According to the results of the air crash,effect, which dealt with a specially created commission under the German Federal Office (BFU). Her conclusions were published two years later. The commission's report indicated two reasons for the collision:
The report also noted numerousmistakes made by the center's management in Zurich and the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). So, the owners of the Swiss company Skyguide for many years allowed such an order of work of air traffic controllers, in which only one person could control the air traffic, while his partner was resting at that time. An air crash over Lake Constance (2002) made it clear that so many personnel were clearly not enough. In addition, the equipment, which was supposed to prompt the dispatcher about the possible rapprochement of airliners, was switched off that night due to maintenance.
As for the phones, they also did not work.It was for this reason that Peter Nielsen could not reach the airport in Friedrichshafen (a small town located north of Lake Constance) at the right time, in order to convey to the dispatchers there the management of the arriving aircraft with delay, followed by the Swiss at the second terminal . In addition, due to the lack of telephone communication, the duty officers in Karlsruhe, who had noticed the dangerous rapprochement in the air much earlier, could not warn Nielsen of the impending catastrophe.
Also, the commission that investigated the collisionover the Lake Constance, noted that the ICAO documents governing the use of TCAS and the crew of the Tu-154 were partly inconsistent 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 the TCAS prompts, and on the other hand it was considered auxiliary, thus creating the impression that the dispatcher's commands are a priority. From this one can draw the only correct conclusion: if it were not for a series of absurd accidents and fatal mistakes, a plane crash over the Lake Constance (2002) would simply be impossible.
With the fall of aircraft this tragedy did not end.Unfortunate relatives buried their children, and some families after that broke up, unable to withstand such grief. Many lives have taken with them the disaster over the Lake Constance. The list of the victims originally 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 company manager 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 that ill-fated flight No. 2937. The trial lasted almost a year. At the end of October 2005 Kaloyeva was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 8 years in prison. Given 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 Uberlingen, in the vicinityLake Constance, an unusual monument, reminiscent of the tragedy of more than 10 years ago. It is made in the form of a torn necklace, whose pearls flew all along the trajectory of the fall of the debris of two airliners.
