Plane wreckage found near Mt. Olympus (12/28/97)

Plane wreckage found near Mt. Olympus

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The remains of the YAK-42 Ukrainian aircraft and its passengers that disappeared while attempting to land at the Greek port city of Salonika were finally found on December 20 outside the city in a heavily wooded area near Mount Olympus.

After a three-day trouble-filled search by land and by air, which included 5,000 civilian and military personnel and a U.S. military plane with weather-piercing surveillance equipment, rescuers discovered the charred wreckage of the three-engine turbofan jet in a snow-covered valley near the village of Fotina.

There were no survivors among the 70 passengers and crew members, among them 25 Ukrainian and 34 Greek citizens.

"It's an area of total disaster," said Fillipos Petsalnikos, a government minister who represents the area, according to the Associated Press.

The plane disintegrated on impact, which left a nearly 200-meter swath of clipped and uprooted trees. Only a piece of wing and part of the cockpit remained intact, possibly giving investigators important data from the flight recorder and other instruments.

The intense fire that followed charred and fused many of the human remains. Clothes and valuables were found in the trees and scattered about the crash site. According to Interfax-Ukraine, the remains of 15 Ukrainian citizens have been identified thus far.

Investigators are examining whether the crash was due to pilot error. Leonid Pohrebniak, the president of Aerosweet [Editor's note: last week the name of the airline was improperly given as Aeroswift], the airline company that owned the plane, said on December 18, the day after the crash occurred, that the pilots had never made the challenging landing at Salonika Airport, which is sandwiched between the Mount Olympus range and the Aegean Sea.

The flight, originally on a Boeing 737, had left Kyiv on December 17 on its way to Salonika with a scheduled stopover in Odesa. After experiencing engine trouble before landing at the Ukrainian Black Sea port, Aerosweet authorities decided to switch planes and borrowed the YAK-42 from Air Ukraine.

According to the Greek Ministry of Transportation, at Salonika a heavy rain and fog caused the pilot to abort his first landing attempt and circle for a second one. In his last communication with the airport's control tower, the pilot said he was at 3,500 feet and that everything was fine. The wreckage of the plane was discovered at 4,000 feet above sea level.

A Greek C-130 military transport plane and its crew were also among the casualties of the catastrophe. It went down on December 20 moments after leaving Athens to join the search, which was hampered by heavy fog and snow.

| Home Page |