It is September 8, 1989, when a CV-580 Convair of the Norwegian Company Partnair, engaged in a Charter flight from Oslo to Hamburg, falls into the North Sea off the coast of Danish with 55 people on board. This is the most serious aerial massacre in the history of Scandinavian aviation. The 50 passengers are almost all employees of the Wilhelmsen navigation company, which will participate in Hamburg in the launch ceremony of a new ship. The other five victims are members of the crew. There is a festive air among travelers, they sip wine and champagne waiting for the landing. They feel safe, but so it is.
Partnair’s problems
The plane, built 36 years earlier for the United Airlines, and passed through several owners, over time has undergone several changes, in 1978 he was even reconstructed after a landing accident. On the day of the massacre, there are two expert drivers at the command, Captain Knut Tveiten and the first Finn Petter Berg officer, both fifty -ninety -olds, friends for years and with almost 17,000 flight hours behind them. A few seconds before the crash in the piloting cabin there is a relaxed air, the two friends joke together with the complicity that has always distinguished them. They don’t know that those will be their last moments of life. Berg is also responsible for partnair’s flight operations, a company that in those months pays to serious economic difficulties. At that time the accumulated debts are so important that the Norwegian aeronautical authorities have ordered the airports not to allow the take -off of the partnair planes if the company does not first weld the arrears. So that day, before the flight can start, Berg is forced to leave the pilot cabin to pay an account with the catering company: only in this way the aircraft has the permission to take off, almost an hour late. The problems are not only financial. Before taking off, the inspection mechanic discovers that one of the two main current generators does not work, but cannot repair it. In Norway, a plane can only fly if it has two functioning current generators, so the co -pilot proposes to remedy the fault, leaving the Auxiliary Power Unit (Apu), unit of auxiliary power on the flight, in order to have the two necessary energy sources available. The pilots, however, ignore that one of the three supports of the APS is broken.
The dynamics of the accident
At 15:59 the Convair finally takes off from Oslo. The journey initially proceeds without problems, except for a meeting with a Norwegian F-16 fighter: the military pilot, surprised to be in front of the aircraft, contacts the Oslo control tower thinking of a radar error, but this episode will not affect the imminent accident. Then, reaching 22,000 feet above the North Sea, the tail of the aerial partnair begins to vibrate abnormally. There are two causes: on the one hand the broken support of the APS, on the other the counterfeit bolts that fix the vertical stabilizer to the fuselage, these are non -compliant spare parts and with a resistance lower than the safety standards. Just before 19, radar controllers notice anomalies: the plane begins to deviate and loses altitude quickly. The pilots try to maintain control for a few minutes, until, at 7 pm, part of the tail ends up detaching and the plane disintegrates in flight before crashing into the sea. Nobody will save himself. The accident is so sudden and dramatic that Berg could have instinctively reacting a whole toilet: the presence of the object in the stomach is detected by the autopsy. There are those who claim, however, that he had been swallowed before the accident.
The investigations
The survey is entrusted to the accused investigation board Norway (AIBN), which recovers 50 of the 55 bodies and uses side scan Sonar to locate the scrap, missing in an area of two square kilometers, a sign that the disintegration took place in the air. Unfortunately, the investigation is hindered and slowed down by the malfunction of the CVR, the Voice Recorder cockpit (the audio “black box”), which did not record the last minutes of conversation between the drivers. The Norwegian press immediately advances alternative and uncomfortable hypotheses, referring to a possible bomb on board because the Norwegian Prime Minister Give Harlem Brundtland had used that plane on the occasion of his travel campaign. This hypothesis is advocated by some witnesses who claim to have heard a strong roar before seeing the convair falling. In fact, traces of explosives will actually be found on a part of the fuselage, but subsequent analyzes will show that these are contaminations due to old ammunition of the Second World War present on the seabed. There are also those who speak of a NATO missile launched by mistake during an ongoing military exercise that day. The conclusions of the investigators are clear: the combination of defective and vibrations produced by unsuitable bolts has compromised the stability of the aircraft. The accident of the Partna 394 flight thus becomes an emblematic case of how corruption and use of counterfeit components can turn into an air catastrophe.
What happens later
After the accident, the FBI stops several brokers that provided fake spare parts. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) discovers that there was an organization that produced lower quality spare parts, counterfeiting the original labels and certifications of the same FAA. Initially, American public opinion believes that this scandal overwhelms and interests only the smallest airlines, but it will be discovered that non -original spare parts were also used on Air Force One, therefore it is a common practice to all airlines.
From that moment, the FAA adopts a more rigorous system to certify the original spare parts, notifying the companies that would have undergone criminal consequences if they had consciously accepted to use false spare parts.