Exactly 20 years ago, a terrible tragedy occurred in the skies over Germany.

The Russian Tu-154M passenger plane, en route from Moscow to Spain, collided with a cargo Boeing-757 belonging to DHL due to a dispatcher's error.

No one survived the plane crash - 71 people became its victims, including 65 Russians.

We trusted the dispatcher

Of the 60 passengers on board the Russian aircraft, 52 were children of various ages.

Almost all of them were from Bashkiria and flew to Spain on vacation on vouchers from the Republican Committee for UNESCO.

  • AP

The tragedy was preceded by a fatal mistake - in Moscow, the organizers brought the children to Sheremetyevo Airport instead of Domodedovo, so the group did not have time for the originally planned flight.

As a result, everyone was transferred to the Tu-154M, which urgently flew in for this together with the crew from Ufa.

According to the official report on the causes of the tragedy, the Russian passenger plane and the cargo Boeing flew over Germany at about the same height, both sides were coordinated by the control center in Zurich.

At the time of the dangerous approach of the liners, only one dispatcher out of two remained at the monitors.

The dispatcher of the Swiss air navigation company Skyguide, Peter Nielsen, simultaneously monitored several aircraft on two monitors - his and his colleagues.

He ordered the Russian crew to descend and the crew of the cargo plane to climb, despite the fact that the security system on board both aircraft signaled the pilots to take reverse action.

The commission investigating the plane crash recognized Nielsen's erroneous instructions as one of the main causes of the tragedy.

The crews of the crashed aircraft, according to the flight rules of that time, were obliged, first of all, to follow the instructions of the dispatcher, and not the airborne collision avoidance system (TCAS), which warned of the dangerous approach of the airliners.

Already after the tragic collision over Lake Constance, the rules were changed and it was the teams of on-board security systems that made it a priority for the pilots. 

After the announcement of the investigation report in February 2004, the second act of the air tragedy played out.

Peter Nielsen was killed by an architect from Vladikavkaz, Vitaly Kaloev, who lost his wife, son and daughter in a plane crash.

Kaloev was recognized as partially sane and sentenced to 8 years in prison.

In November 2007, he was released for good behavior and returned home.

In the same year, three Skyguide managers were given a suspended sentence, one was fined, and it was not possible to prove the guilt of four more employees of the company - they were acquitted.

"I can't live without heaven"

Manuella, daughter of Alexander Gross, commander of the crashed Tu-154M, worked as a flight attendant for Bashkir Airlines with her father.

According to her, their family has always been “flying”: their mother, Valentina, is a former flight attendant, and Manuella’s younger sister worked at the Ufa airport.

Together with her father, Manuella flew only a couple of times - according to unspoken rules, relatives are usually not allowed in the same crew.

The woman recalls that on the eve of the disaster, she and her sister drove Alexander Mikhailovich by car from the dacha to Ufa airport.

“Both me and my dad then had a day off, but I already had a flight the next day, so they didn’t offer me to fly then,” Manuella explained.

  • Tu-154M commander Alexander Gross

  • © Photo from the personal archive of the Gross family

According to the daughter of the deceased crew commander, since the upcoming flight to Barcelona was unscheduled, the crew for it was recruited from employees who left for the weekend.

There was nothing unusual about this - according to the rules, it is necessary that the entire flight crew has time to rest between flights.

According to Manuella, the first to know about the plane crash was his father's best friend, his colleague.

From him, the pilot's family learned about the incident.

“The whole airport was crying then: both dad and colleagues that were with him on that flight, everyone knew, respected and loved.

My father did not even think about the pension, he was going to fly until the medical board wrote off.

He visited many countries, flew all over Russia far and wide, ”recalls Manuella.

- But his favorite place was, perhaps, his native Beloretsk.

He tried to be there not only on vacation, but also on long weekends.

I always wanted my own house outside the city and even started building it.

And we finished it after the death of the pope.

Gross's daughter flew to the crash site in July 2002 to identify her father's body, flew to Germany on the first anniversary of the disaster.

Manuella worked as a flight attendant until 2007, when Bashkir Airlines was liquidated: “Even after what happened to my dad, I continued to fly.

I realized that without the sky I can not.

Aviation is forever, everything is different there, and people reveal themselves in completely different ways. ”

"I knew them all"

Vyacheslav Shchiglintsev at the time of the crash worked as a flight engineer at Bashkir Airlines and headed the trade union of the squadron from which the dead crew was.

  • © AP Photo/ Misha Japaridze

He learned about the plane crash in the sky over Germany on vacation, from the morning news.

“I was then with my family in Sochi, resting.

In the morning we are going to fly home, then my wife sees the news on TV, she calls me: “Oh, look, there are yours!”.

At first I didn’t believe it, ”the former flight engineer recalls in an interview with RT.

“I knew all of them.

Someone better, someone worse, from time to time we flew together.

According to Shchiglintsev’s memoirs, they worked with their deceased colleague Oleg Valeev for five years at an aviation technical base, then in 1991 they studied together the control of the Tu-154 at the flight training center in Ulyanovsk and entered the Moscow Institute of Civil Aviation together.

“A flight engineer generally initially works on the ground in order to better know the materiel, to master everything.

And only then, when he gains experience, they take the most worthy into the sky, ”added Vyacheslav.

With Oleg Grigoriev, who checked the crashed side, and co-pilot Murat Itkulov, he learned to fly the An-24: according to the practice that has developed since the times of the USSR, first the future crew members passed the control of the An-2, then the An-24, and then the Tu-134 or Tu-154 .

From the stories of colleagues, Vyacheslav learned that the Russian crew tried to avoid a collision even after the order from the air traffic controller Peter Nielsen to start descending, although in 2002 the TCAS system was only installed on the aircraft of Russian airlines and at that stage it was used as an additional tool.

  • © AP Photo/Daniel Maurer

As the flight engineer explained, when 40 seconds remain between aircraft, regardless of altitude and rate of climb or descent, the TCAS screen flashes yellow and shows where the second aircraft is.

And if there are 15 seconds left between the liners, the screen lights up red, and the program gives an order to descend or climb in order to separate the planes.

“It would be correct, of course, for our board to gain altitude, and for the cargo one to descend.

The system literally shouted to our board about climbing, and the controller mistakenly said the opposite, ”recalls Vyacheslav.

- Our PIC commanded: “Guys, look with all your eyes!

He's down there somewhere!"

It was early morning, it was getting light, and they saw him - to the left and from below.

The crew turned the steering wheel towards themselves, but the plane is very heavy, the takeoff weight, if I'm not mistaken, is more than 100 tons.

It just took a few seconds."

According to the flight engineer, the collision over Lake Constance was a terrible blow for the airline as well: there were no serious accidents with Bashkir Airlines until 2002, and even more so with such losses.

Five years after the incident, the company was liquidated, and Vyacheslav Shchiglintsev, together with his colleagues, continued to work in the Ufa branch of UTair.

“Flying after what happened was not scary.

There is such a film “Special Forces”, there is just such a phrase: “And we were taught this!” Vyacheslav shares.

- I finished my flight activity only in January 2014, and then only because all the Tu-154s were reduced to please the Boeings.

And so, maybe he could still fly. ”

Everlasting memory

On July 2, 2022, relatives and friends of the victims of the Boden plane crash will traditionally gather at the Southern Cemetery of Ufa, where 53 of the 69 victims of the plane crash are buried.

Orthodox and Muslim memorial services will be held for all those present.

  • Memorial to the dead crew members of the Tu-154M at Ufa airport

  • © From the personal archive of Vyacheslav Shchiglintseva

Also on this day, wreaths and flowers are traditionally laid at the memorial at the Ufa airport - former airport employees and retired colleagues of the deceased crew come there.

Funeral services for the dead were repeatedly held not far from the crash site - in the vicinity of the German city of Überling, where a memorial "Die zerrissene Perlenkette" ("Broken string of pearls") was erected on a wheat field.

It was based on the pearl necklace of Vitaly Kaloev's daughter Diana found at the site of the tragedy.