El Al Flight 1862 - Crash

Crash

At 6:35 pm local time, the Boeing 747, in an over ninety degree bank and with a nose-down attitude of about 70 degrees, plummeted into two high-rise apartment complexes in the Bijlmermeer neighborhood, at the corner of a building where the Groeneveen complex met the Klein-Kruitberg complex. The plane exploded and set fire to the building, which partially collapsed inward, destroying dozens of apartments. The cockpit came to rest east of the flats, between the building and the viaduct of Amsterdam Metro Line 53.

During the last moments of the flight, the arrival traffic controllers made several desperate attempts to contact the aircraft. The Schiphol arrival controllers work from a closed building at Schiphol-East, not from the control tower. At 6:35:45 pm, however, the control tower reported to the arrival controllers: "Het is gebeurd" (lit., "It has happened", but often meaning "It is over"). At that moment a large cloud of smoke was visible above Amsterdam from the control tower. El Al Flight 1862 disappeared from arrival control radar. The arrival controllers reported that the aircraft had last been located 1 mile west of Weesp and emergency personnel were sent immediately.

At the time of the crash, two police officers were in the Bijlmermeer checking on a burglary report. They saw the aircraft plummet and immediately sounded an alarm. The first fire trucks and rescue services arrived within a few minutes of the crash. Nearby hospitals were advised to prepare for hundreds of casualties. The flats were partly inhabited by undocumented illegal immigrants, and the death toll would be difficult to estimate in the hours after the crash.

In the days immediately following the disaster, the bodies of the victims and the remains of the plane were recovered from the crash site. The remains of the plane were transported to Schiphol for analysis. The parts were not used by investigators to reconstruct the aircraft.

The aircraft's flight data recorder was recovered from the crash site, with its data intact. The cockpit voice recorder, however, had been destroyed, although El Al employees stated that it had been installed in the aircraft.