Look Up in Horror

Flying at 29,000 ft. near Zagreb, Yugoslavia, last week, Lufthansa Pilot Josef Kroese chanced to glance above him. There he saw a scene that caused him to stare in disbelief. Four thousand feet overhead, at the same altitude, two other jetliners were closing fast from opposite directions. As Kroese looked on in horror, the planes smashed head-on into each other. They immediately fell from the sky in battered pieces of wreckage that landed twelve miles apart; at least one woman, working on her farm, was killed by the debris. After reassembling corpses, which were strewn all over the broad area, as best they could and checking them against airline lists, Yugoslav authorities announced that 176 people had died in the collision.

The toll was the highest in aviation history for a two-plane crash, exceeding the casualty list of 162 five years ago at Morioka, Japan, when a Japanese fighter with a student pilot at the controls plowed into an All Nippon Airways Boeing 727. Even so, in an era of constantly expanding aircraft capacity, the Yugoslav accident was not the worst crash on record. That doubtful honor still belongs to a Turkish Airlines DC-10 jumbo that crashed near Paris two years ago, killing all 345 people aboard.

The planes in last week's collision were a British Airways Trident--Flight 476--bound from London to Istanbul with 63 aboard, and a Yugoslav DC-9. The Yugoslav plane had been chartered to return West German vacationers to Cologne after a 14-day vacation at the Adriatic resort of Split.

One of the first to arrive at the scene of the crash was Policeman Garo Tomaevic. "I saw bodies lying all around," he told reporters. "There was a baby still giving feeble signs of life near the [British] plane, but even if the ambulances had arrived before me, it would have been too late to save it."

Reconstructing events, Yugoslav authorities were told that the DC-9 had been cleared shortly before the crash to climb to 35,000 ft. But the area around Zagreb--a key sky junction of routes to Turkey, Greece and Mediterranean resorts--is one of Europe's busiest air corridors, and the Yugoslav pilot was unaware that the British Trident was already flying at that altitude. Zagreb's air controllers may well be responsible for this fatal error. The preliminary opinion of Vjeceslav Jakovac, the Yugoslav judge heading the investigation, was that the controllers probably had incorrectly assessed the altitude of the planes. Five of the controllers were taken into custody for questioning. If found guilty, they could face stiff penalties; in 1974, a Zagreb locomotive engineer found responsible for a train crash killing 130 people received a 15-year prison sentence.

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