South African Airways Flight 228

- 22.45028055555617.524030555556Koordinaten: 22 ° 27 '1 " S, 17 ° 31' 27" E

The South African Airways Flight 228 was a flight of South African Airways with a Boeing 707 on Jan Smuts International Airport (now OR Tambo International Airport ) in Johannesburg to London Heathrow Airport with scheduled stopovers in Windhoek, Luanda, Las Palmas and Frankfurt.

On April 20, 1968, he crashed shortly after launch five kilometers east of the " JG Strijdom International Airport ", today's Hosea Kutako International Airport, 45 kilometers east of the Namibian capital Windhoek, from. When the aircraft accident 123 people were killed, five people were injured rescued.

Course of the accident

At 20:49 local time clock (South Africa Standard Time ) picked up the bare metal of the Boeing 707- 344C, from having only 238 total flight hours from the runway 08 of the airport near Windhoek. The night was moon and cloudless, and there was no wind. After retracting the flaps and reduce the engine thrust to climb at an altitude of about 200 m, the machine went into a - on descent and struck about five kilometers east of the airport, just 30 seconds after the start - probably unnoticed.

Cause of the accident

Due to the fact that the accident engine had neither a flight data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder, the cause of research for the accident was difficult. Although flight recorders had become on 1 January of the accident year compulsory, many of the machines in the South African Airways at the time were not equipped with it due to supply shortages.

The Pilot - in -Command Smith decreed on the Boeing 707 on a flight experience of 4608 hours of flight time, but had completed only an hour's flight on the Model 344C until the accident. The official accident investigation has revealed that all four engines of the machine worked. The cause of the accident was obvious to human error, as the captain and the first officer " not a safe airspeed and altitude as well as no suitable climb ensured, as they are the flight instruments are not sufficiently observed during the startup phase ." The third person in the cockpit was expressly charged not at fault.