LOT Flight 7 - Crash

Crash

On its final flight, the aircraft was piloted by Captain Paweł Lipowczan and First Officer Tadeusz Łochocki. Flight 007 was scheduled to depart from Kennedy International Airport at about 19:00 local time on 13 March 1980, but it was delayed because of a heavy snowstorm. It finally departed at 21:18, and after nine hours of an uneventful flight, it was approaching Okęcie Airport at 11:13 local time. During their final approach, about one minute before the landing, the crew reported to Okęcie Air Traffic Control that the landing gear indicator light was not operating, and that they would go-around and allow the flight engineer to check if it was caused by a burnt-out fuse or lightbulb, or if there was actually some problem with the gears deploying.

(11:13:46) Okęcie Air Traffic Control: LOT 007, 5 degrees to the right.

(11:13:52) Okęcie ATC: LOT 007?

(11:13:54) LOT: Roger that... One moment, we have some problems with landing-gear-down-and-locked indicator, request a go-around.

(11:13:57) Okęcie ATC: Roger, runway heading and altitude 650 meters.

(11:14:00) LOT: Runway heading and 650.

This was the last transmission from "Kopernik". Nine seconds later, the aircraft suddenly entered a steep dive. At 11:14:35, after 26 seconds of uncontrolled descent, the aircraft clipped a tree with its right wing and impacted the ice-covered moat of a 19th-century military fortress with the speed of about 380 km/h (238 mph) at a 20-degree down angle, 950 meters away from the runway threshold and 100 meters from a residential area. At the last moment Captain Paweł Lipowczan, using nothing but the plane’s ailerons, managed to avoid hitting a correctional facility for teenagers located at Rozwojowa street. On impact, the aircraft disintegrated; a large part of the main hull submerged in the moat, while the tail and parts of the main landing gear landed a few meters further, just before the entrance to the fort. On the scene, a diving team was later trying to recover parts of the aircraft (including some of the engines) from the moat, but it was far too murky; finally, the moat had to be dried to allow the air crash investigation team to recover parts of the disintegrated plane. The body of Captain Lipowczan was found lying on the street about sixty meters from the crash site; other bodies were scattered between the plane parts.

Among the 87 fatalities were Polish singer Anna Jantar, American ethnomusicologist Alan P. Merriam, six Polish students returning home from an AIESEC conference in New York and a contingent of the amateur U.S. boxing team. According to the doctors who arrived at the scene, many of the passengers were apparently asleep when the plane hit the ground, but some of them - including many of the boxers - were supposedly aware that they were about to crash, as they held to their seats so strongly that on impact, the muscles and tendons in their arms became severed. Some reports suggested that some of the boxers actually survived the crash and drowned in the moat, but no evidence for this was presented.

By ironic coincidence, at the time the "Kopernik" crashed, a conference on improvements in air travel safety was being held at Okęcie airport, less than a kilometer away.

In a twist of fate, Ryszard Chmielewski, the flight engineer, was scheduled to fly to Warsaw on that day; because he suffered from jet lag and insufficient rest after the previous flight, he switched shifts with one of his colleagues and flew out of New York one day later. Seven years later, as a flight engineer and instructor, monitoring the progress of flight engineer Wojciech Kłossek, he was on board of LOT Flight 5055, which crashed killing all 183 people on board.

In another twist of luck future Light Heavyweight World Champion Bobby Czyz was booked to be on the flight as part of the USA Amateur boxing program however due to a car accident the week before he was injured and did not make the trip. Additionally future boxing world contender Sal Cenicola injured his right shoulder in the weeks leading up the flight and he too did not make the fatal trip beacuse of his injuries before the trip.