2002 Überlingen Mid-air Collision

tfgv ioupi;hblrct86i7og97o8gt0

Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937
Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 was a passenger flight carrying 69 people, most of them children on a school trip. The flight from Moscow would land in Barcelona. The front half of the plane, including the nose, was cut off by Flight 611's vertical stabiliser. This resulted in the plane entering a nose-dive (without the nose) and crashing into the ground.

DHL Flight 611
DHL Flight 611 was a cargo flight being piloted by 2 people. The flight was from Bahrain with a stopover in Bergamo and then ends in Brussels. The plane lost its vertical stabiliser after colliding with Flight 2937, which caused the plane to fall out of the sky.

Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937
There are many pilots in the cockpit. Alexander Mihailovich Gross (Александр Михайлович Гросс) is Captain of this flight. Oleg Pavlovich Grigoriev (Олег Павлович Григорьев) is with him, as the First Officer. The captain has over 12,000 flying hours, and his first officer has 8,500 hours. Ahatovich Itkulov (Мурат Ахатович Иткулов) is behind them, and is off duty. Sergei Gennadyevich Kharlov (Сергей Геннадьевич Харлов) is the flight navigator, and Irikovich Valeev (Олег Ирикович Валеев) is the flight engineer.

DHL Flight 611
There are two pilots on board this flight, and they are the only people on board. Captain Paul Phillips is in charge, Brant Campioni is first officer on this flight. They are both very experienced pilots. Phillips has 12,000 hours in the air, and Campioni has 6,500.

Flying to the Exact Same Place
Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 and DHL Flight 611 were flying to the exact same spot.

There is only one Air Traffic Controller on duty managing the airspace, Peter Nielsen, and official policy says that at least two Air Traffic Controllers must be on duty at any time. But the regulations for this ATC is different, allowing one controller to be monitoring an airspace in the night shift. The controller was distracted by other aircraft on a different radar, meaning that he alerted the pilots of Flight 2937 43 seconds before they collided, but procedure states that they must alert and divert pilots at least 2 minutes before they would collide.

At the time, both planes had a TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) going off, alerting them of the traffic. According to investigators, the Russian pilots were confused by the TCAS.

The Collision
Almost immediately after the air traffic controller told the Flight 2937 pilots to descend to a lower altitude, the final stage of the TCAS system kicked in. It told Flight 611 to descend, which they did, and for Flight 2937 to climb. The pilots of Flight 2937 were confused. They were told by ATC to descend, but the plane is telling them to climb. After being told to descend by ATC again, they decide to listen to them.

Flight 2937 begins descending, despite the TCAS warning. One of the factors that played into this is because in Europe, it is said to listen to TCAS if the ATC is telling you the opposite. But in Russia they claim you have to listen to ATC over TCAS.

After ATC sees that they are descending, he tells them to look out for Flight 611, which should be on their left, but ATC tells them that it is on their right. They eventually spot it, and Flight 611 spots Flight 2937. Flight 611 immediately begins to descend, seeing that Flight 2937 is slightly above them, and Flight 2937 climbs, but its too late.

The DHL's vertical stabiliser slices through Flight 2937's fuselage and killing a few passengers and students on impact, causing the aircraft to fall due to loss of aerodynamics and the half of the whole plane. The DHL aircraft comes out without a vertical stabiliser, as it was destroyed during the impact. We know that a plane cannot fly without it's vertical stabiliser due to American Airlines Flight 587 (which can be seen here here). The aircraft fall out of the sky, and everyone on board each plane died.

The Aftermath
Skyguide were charged for this bad managing of people on duty, and the people who were taking a break and leaving Nielsen to do the work were also charged.

The Murder of Peter Nielsen
On the afternoon of 24 February 2004 Peter Nielsen, the air traffic controller in charge when the collision occured, was murdered by Vitaly Kaloyev, a Russian architect whose family was killed onboard Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937.

Kaloyev murdered Nielsen because he held Nielson responsible for the collision, despite the official report which did not hold Nielson accountable. In 2005, he was sentenced to prison for murder. He was released in 2007, as his mental condition was not considered in court. In 2016, Kaloyev was awarded the medal, 'To the Glory of Ossetia'. The medal is awarded for the highest achievements, improving the living condition, teaching a younger generation and for maintaining law and order. An animation can been seen on the right showing how this happened.

May all of those who died that day rest in peace.