The Biggest Airline Disaster In Norwegian History | Blown Apart | Mayday: Air Disaster

4 30 p.m september the 8th 1989 are flying a charter flight from oslo norway to the german city of hamburg radar the plane is about 100 kilometers from the danish coast one two four decimal five five by partner three nine four how was dinner delicious a little pricey but delicious the two friends have flown around the world together including remote areas of africa they're highly experienced and both are only months away from retirement copenhagen good afternoon partner 394 394 good afternoon radar contact copenhagen control 394. the plane is flying 22 000 feet above the north sea the aircraft they're flying is a twin prop convair 340-580 it's a popular plane for short routes like this one [Music] the plane has been charted by the norwegian shipping company wilhelmsson all 50 passengers are winners of a company lottery sending them on a free trip to hamburg to name a new ship some had maybe been through naming sermons before but the naming ceremonies are quite exciting and the atmosphere was very very very good at the time of leaving one of the company's best employees is chosen to give a speech at the christening of the ship in hamburg you have to deliver a speech and it's not so very often that normal person within the company is giving the honor of naming a ship but just felt that that was right [Music] as the convair crosses the north sea a norwegian air force f-16 approaches the plane on its way home [Music] whoa look at that 11 o'clock f-16 suddenly the plane experiences a violent shock the crew is caught by surprise the plane begins rolling upside down air traffic control notices that partner 394 is off course and falling from the sky [Music] partner 394 copenhagen control please report new flight level the crew is struggling to save the plane and the lives of everyone on board [Music] please report new flight level then it disappears [Music] it seems as though the charter flight has crashed into the sea partner 394 on route to hamburg is off radar [Music] rescue teams race to the crash site nearly 20 kilometers north of the danish coast they find only wreckage and bodies all 55 people who were on the flight are dead [Music] i knew all the people and some were close friends some were less close but i knew them all and the pressure then felt double the shipping company is devastated by the news half the staff from its head office has been killed [Music] it's the biggest airline disaster in norwegian history the nation is in shock [Music] jan owen is a young reporter for norway's largest newspaper he's assigned to cover this story one of the inspectors in the norwegian faa jumped to the conclusion that it had to be sabotage and it was also stated by one of the danish rescue team leaders who said that they had no distress call it just fell out of the sky which meant it had to be a bomb or something and somebody draw links to lockheed the year before in december 1988 pan am flight 103 exploded over lockerbie scotland the evidence in that case is pointing conclusively to a bomb norwegian journalists uncover an intriguing fact about the partner airplane our prime minister at the time guru holland and clancy used to plane on her campaign trip to the north of norway and i guess he used it for two or three days and that was just two or three days before he crashed the nation wonders could the tragedy have been a botched assassination attempt the first headline was sabotaging on the whole front page a bomb would explain the plane's sudden plunge from the sky had the 55 people on board been the innocent victims of a murderer [Music] investigators looking into the mysterious downing of a passenger jet over the north sea are facing a stunning possibility that the plane was deliberately sabotaged the norwegian accident investigation board recruits an air force investigator fein heimdall to join the team it will be a severe test of his investigative skills it's good to be here i started many many years ago with the air force and of course saw some investigations mishandled terribly and i thought it can be done better than that investigators hear from several witnesses who lend support to the idea that the plane was sabotaged a young man claims to have heard a cannon-like sound coming from the crash site of the danish coast it may have been the explosion that brought down the pardon airplane [Music] searchers scour the surface of the sea for floating debris and for victims of the crash eventually all but five bodies are found they're taken to denmark for autopsies those examinations reveal that some of the victims have small puncture-like wounds this supports the notion that a bomb brought down partner flight 394 an autopsy on the first officer also uncovers something unusual a complete unbroken toothpick is discovered in his stomach you know that was a odd finding really because what pointed in both ends and how can you swallow a toothpick like that so he must have been exposed to a very shocking experience but investigators can't confirm that a bomb brought down the plane they'll need to know more about the final moments of flight 394. partner 394 route to hamburg is off radar nine separate radar stations tracked its final seconds they could provide valuable clues the most intriguing readings come from a military radar station in sweden operators there tracked the partner flight as it crossed the north sea it started 1436 the military radar has detected something unexpected there is another object in the same airspace as the plane it is not another airplane it appears as flight 394 started to plummet from 22 000 feet idea what it is simply didn't know what it was from the beginning we had no idea what did what it could have been it took more than half an hour something like 38 minutes and the question was what is light enough to fall that slowly and then solid enough to give radar returns like that whatever the mysterious object was it now lies at the bottom of the sea [Music] a month after the crash investigators are busy recovering sunken wreckage plotted the position of the wreckage on the ocean floor using side scans sonar it sends out sound waves that are reflected back when they encounter objects the sonar equipment has painted a remarkably accurate picture of the underwater wreckage [Music] it helps investigators see that the plane parts have settled over a two kilometer wide area it's an important piece of evidence it was evident that the aircraft had come apart in the air it hadn't hit the sea in one piece that was for sure the mid-air breakup suggests a bomb brought down the plane but it will take weeks to prove this in the meantime investigators hope the plane's black boxes will provide more immediate insight into the crash the plane's voice recorder and eventually its data recorder are recovered from the seabed and sent to labs for analysis both boxes were damaged in the crash investigators hope the damage to the boxes didn't affect the data well let's see what we got the voice recorder may have picked up a conversation between the pilots that can explain what happened on board that's required autofeather system the device usually records the final minutes of a flight but this cvr has done the opposite lights off power it recorded the start of the flight but then mysteriously stopped recording just before the plane took off well it had recorded a conversation on the ground but as soon as the engines were up shifted to normal rpm for takeoff it ceased operations so there was a disappointment to us but the malfunctioning cvr did pick up an intriguing exchange between the two pilots how's the weather handling oh it's clear skies good visibility hope it stays that way the cvr does tell investigators that flight 394 began with an unusual problem partner was in uh financial dire straits and we found out that just a few hours before the plane took off the norwegian aviation authorities sent out the telex to tell all the airports in norway to don't let a partner plane take off because they owe a lot of money in non-paid charges and fees they won't release us for takeoff until we pay the catering bill how much you got on you seriously probably enough actually i'll take care of it the first officer was forced to leave the cockpit to pay the caterers for on-board meals investigators check maintenance records to find out why the cvr only recorded the crew's conversation while they were on the ground they discovered that the plane's cockpit voice recorder had been modified more than 10 years earlier modified to switch to primary ac it was altered so that when the engines were given full power for takeoff your power the cvr would automatically switch from the plane's batteries to its generator [Music] and that modification was not working on this aircraft neither pilot realized that as the engines were revved up for takeoff power to the cvr was actually cut off any time you get key investigation components such as a cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder that don't work correctly it brings into the question the thoroughness of the maintenance and and also the the continued operation safe operation of the airplanes the malfunctioning voice recorder and the unpaid catering bill lead investigators to look more closely at the history of the airplane and the company that owned it partner airlines partner operated a fleet of mostly older planes that flew to northern european destinations [Music] the convair that crashed into the north sea was one of the airline's most recent acquisitions [Music] but the plane itself was 36 years old it had a complicated history of both ownership and modification the biggest change was to the plane's engines really important qualification was upgrading the engines to turbine engines on prop planes the propeller moves air backwards propelling the plane forward early prop planes used piston engines to turn the propeller but turbine engines which use a series of fans not pistons to compress air generate substantially more power [Music] heimdall learns that in 1960 the plane's original piston engines were removed and powerful new turbo props were bolted to the wings it's a modification that provides more power but could pose a risk there was a tremendous increase of horsepower installing the turbine engines i was wondering what that was doing to the structure of the aircraft heimdall has been placed in charge of analyzing the plane's engines [Music] he wants to know if the turbine engines could have torn the aging plane apart i started asking the question how can an aircraft fly itself to pieces in mid-air the plane's flight data recorder should tell investigators about the operation of the engines in the moment before the crash the recorder from this flight is a primitive analog model to use the metal foil strip that rotated and some marking pins uh actually scratched on the on the metal surface on the piece of metal the antiquated data recorder proves to be another frustration for investigators it didn't record many of the parameters it was supposed to but more mysteriously the needle seems to have recorded certain signals twice the double line confounds experts who analyze the device we had no experience with anything like that we contacted several experts but none had experience with this before yeah i've never seen it the flight data doesn't offer investigators any immediate revelations about the crash heimdall now wonders if the very fact that the recorder was malfunctioning could be a clue in itself he decides to send the flight data recorder back to the american company that made it for further analysis [Music] investigators painstakingly reconstruct the partner plane the norwegian team recovered the the airplane with assistance from the the local authorities in the danish authorities i believe and decided to reconstruct the airplane a reconstruction is like putting together a puzzle that helps investigators focus the investigation on areas that need to be looked at and perhaps prioritize the investigation [Music] as the fuselage takes shape the reconstructed plane provides investigators with some stunning evidence [Music] the only thing that would destroy the aircraft at cruising level would be an explosion so and some of the parts looked maybe a bit vicious suspicious for what's on them there were rumors that it was found the explosives at in the partner plane there are traces of a powerful military explosive the amount is small but the press gets wind of it [Music] the explosive residue could be from a bomb on board the plane [Music] or from another source a nato war exercise called operation sharp spear was taking place that same day near the flight path of flight 394 one of the pilots i talked to and he said i guess it might have been the so-called cold rocket test rocket might have gone through one of the wings or diffused later the fuselage many people now wonder if an errant warhead played a role in bringing down the plane [Music] but when the explosive residue is analyzed it's found not to have been from a bomb or a warhead there simply isn't enough of it on the plane there was a small sign of explosives but that was a very low level and looked more like a contamination than anything else you

Channel: Mayday: Air Disaster

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Id: FFIef0K_VVQ

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 04 2021