Serious plane crash over southern Germany

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Board ate OP. Here it is.

Around midnight local time, a Boeing 757, believed to be a freighter, collided with a Tupolev (possibly a passenger plane :() near the Bodensee in Germany. Allegedy, the collision occured at 12 kilometers height. Seems near impossibe, yet it happened.

Developing story here: http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/07/01/plane.collision.ap/index.html

Morbid as it may sound, I hope the other one’s a freighter too. Several houses on the ground are on fire, debris is scattered over a 30 by 40 km. area.

My God.

2

Sad to see this happens to Mods, too.

Here’s a link: Planes collide over Lake Constance

3

Sad news. 80 people on the passanger plane.

BBC News Report.

4

Fuck. :frowning:

5

I hate this stuff. And with a mid-air, there’s definitely a human screw-up involved.

Here’s hoping there’s no ground casulties.

6

Ditto.

7

God. I only hope the initial impact and explosion ensured the people involved didn’t know what hit them. The concept of a conscious 12km fall is something I’d rather not think about.

8

TV Update:

50+ killed on the ground.

:frowning:

9

My goodness…

Call me morbid, but the recent strikes of air traffic controllers in Europe better not have anything to do with this. :frowning:

10

My God, that’s horrible… 50 on the ground alone? God…

:frowning:

11

I still haven’t seen any confirmation about the 50+ on the ground. Let’s hope the TV’s got it wrong.

12

This report from the Sydney Morning Herald gives two separate estimates:

and

I think the TV report I saw was in error in that they were reading both estimates as correct, and assuming the difference was made up of victims on the ground. I hope that is the case, and that the lower figure is the actual one.

13

The recent update on cnn.com says at least 71 dead; 57 passengers and 12 crew on the Tu-154, and 2 crew on the Boeing cargo jet. Their timestamp on the article is 10:29 PM EDT (0229 GMT). No mention of anyone dead on the ground.

14

And CNN feels the need to throw this in:

Because most “safe” planes would survive a collision with a 757 at 35,000 feet. Right?

15

How is it that two planes collide into each other at 36,000 feet, anyway?

Don’t they see each other from a far enough distance to change course???

16

It was night, for one. They should probably have collision avoidance gear, but it’s not clear whether either had this. The area where they were flying is sort of is fairly populated and probably gets a lot of air traffic. It’s also possible (not yet ruled out) that Swiss Air control directed the flights into the same spot. Many planes fly at about that altitude.

17

Sky News reported this morning that German ATC had repeatedly instructed the crew of the Tupolev to change altitude. The Russian flight crew did not apparently due to a lack of English skills. I think this says more about slipping standards in Russian regulations than about the aircraft in this incident.

18

No victims on the ground, apparently some houses were hit by debris but nobody was hurt.

The bad news is that most of the passengers of the Tupolev were children on their way to holidays in Spain. :frowning:

19

Russian teens. :frowning:

goddammit

20

:frowning:

Horrible

Report from radio indicate that the communication screw-up and delay in taking action by the Tu154 may have then been compounded by the 757’s CAS leading them to make an evasive maneouver that mirrored the last-minute moves of the Tu154 (as in, he dives to his left, I dive to my right, net effect = towards, instead of away from, each other).
And yes, SmackFu, that was a sterling moment of bringing in unrelated data just because it came up when they searched their files for “Tu-154”.