LOT Flight 5055 - Accident Summary

Accident Summary

The chartered plane to New York City took off from runway 33 at Okecie Airport at 10:18 am. The pilots were cleared to climb to 31,000 feet (9,400 m) with a course set to Grudziądz VOR, which was reached at 26,500 feet (8,100 m). Soon after Flight 5055 took off from Warsaw, the crew was instructed by the ATC to climb to an altitude 6000 m (18000 ft) as quickly as possible:

10:26	Flight 5055	Well, we go to New York, possibly we'll be able to get to flight level 180... (tongue-in-cheek)
10:26	Okęcie ATC	Gentlemen! You won't make it. You have about 5 kilometers to the TMN . I told you that clearance was set for 180 or higher. Military planes are training there, I have no communication with them to allow separation.
10:26	Flight 5055	Roger that. Roger that.
10:31:35	Okęcie ATC	5055, heading 310, immediately cut flight level 170.
10:31:39	Flight 5055	5055, heading 310.
10:31:41	Okęcie ATC	Climb immediately. I mean it, immediately.

At the moment, the crew applied maximum thrust on the engines to climb to 6000m. Supposedly, had they not applied thrust, the turbine disc in the inner left engine would have survived the entire flight. However, nine minutes after the thrust was applied, the faulty bearings inside the engine overheated enough (to about 1000°C.) to cause an explosion.

An engine exploded and started burning at 10.41 a.m., when the plane had just passed Lipinki village, near Warlubie (near Grudziądz, at 8,200 m and 810 km/h). The overheated bearings exploded, destroying the shaft; the turbine disc on the burning engine separated from the destroyed shaft; the freed disc spun to an enormous speed and, within seconds, explosively disintegrated, destroying engine two. Debris from the explosion violently spread around (with an estimated speed of 160 m/s), puncturing the hull, severing flight controls and electrical cables and causing damage to engine one — outer left one, which soon started also to burn. A piece of burning debris burst into cargo hold number 4 and caused a rapidly spreading fire; the inner left engine burned rapidly until impact.

Immediately, the crew noticed that the elevator control systems had failed — only vertical trim remained operative — and that two engines were disabled. The reasons for this were unknown to the crew; they initially suspected that the plane could have been hit by something. The pilots started an emergency descent to 13,200 ft (4,000 m). The closest airport where Il-62 might land was Gdańsk, but landing there was not possible because the crew could not dump enough fuel for the emergency landing attempt (the takeoff weight of the plane on that day was 167 tons, until 10:41 approximately 6 tons of fuel were consumed; the maximum landing weight of Il-62M was 107 tons) so they turned their heading to Warsaw instead. Due to the damaged electrical system, the crew had problems with fuel dumping and they didn't realize that the fire had spread to the cargo holds in the back of the plane (cargo hold 4 and 6, and in final minutes probably reached into passenger cabin).

Initially, the crew intended to land at the military airport in Modlin, but at the final moment they decided to continue the flight to Okęcie, where there was better fire and medical equipment. It was unclear at the time why the crew decided to continue the flight to Warsaw, given the rapidly spreading fire and lost flight controls, rather than land as quickly as possible at Modlin, where the fire and medical equipment was worse than at Okęcie, but still good enough to deal with an emergency landing of an airliner with an in-flight fire. Many at the time believed officials had decided the airliner must not land at a military airport and (contrary to official reports) denied the crew's request to land at Modlin. While this is somewhat plausible, no conclusive evidence supporting this theory was ever presented. The most probable hypothesis is that due to damage to the electrical systems, both the fire detector in the cargo hold and inside the engine did not work properly (on the CVR, an engine fire sound indicator was heard shortly after the explosion, but it later faded out; the signal reappeared less than four minutes before the crash and continued until impact) and so Cpt. Pawlaczyk did not know about the magnitude of the fire in the hold and how quickly it was spreading, nor about the burning engine when he decided to fly to Warsaw.

About 10:53, an explosion in the cargo hold occurred; the reasons are unknown. It is supposed that some of the fuel tanks were damaged and fuel vapors drifted into burning cargo hold, causing an explosion.

The passengers were fully aware of the emergency; one of the passengers managed to write on the opening page of her copy of the New Testament: 9.05.1987 The plane's damaged... God, what will happen now... Halina Domeracka, R. Tagore St., Warsaw...

CVR fragment — the moment of engine explosion

10.41.28 Intermittent acoustic signal of autopilot disengage

10.41.30 Crew: Hey! Pressurization!

10.41.32 Acoustic ringing signal of cabin decompression

10.41.34 Crew: Is there a fire? What's going on?

10.41.35 Crew: Probably a fire.

10.41.37 Crew: Engine? Shut it down!

10.41.39 Crew: ...shut down. That first one is burning!

10.41.42 Crew: ...fire...

10.41.44 Crew: ...all small

10.41.45 Crew: Warsaw?

10.41.46 Crew: ...all small. Decompression.

10.41.48 Crew: Two engines are gone!

10.41.49 Continuous acoustic signal of engine fire.

10.41.50 Crew: Two engines are gone! Shut down... We're turning around! Fire!

10.41.55 Crew: Danger!!! Warsaw radar LOT! Warsaw radar!

The crew tried to land at Okęcie from the south (due to strong wind) and turned the plane 180 degrees to runway 33 but a rapidly spreading in-flight fire, which spread to the exterior of the plane (plane was trailing a huge flame and dense black smoke), caused a total failure of surviving flight controls, the plane trim. Also, the gear lowering was not functioning. The emergency fuel dumping pumps were also malfunctioning; supposedly because of damaged electrical systems, sometimes they stopped functioning at all, only to resume dumping fuel minutes later. At the moment of the crash, approximately 32 tons of fuel were still in tanks. A very straight turn to the left was started at 11.09 at 4,900 ft (1,500 m) with an airspeed of 480 km/h. At the moment, as plane passed the village of Józefosław, approximately 10 kilometers from the airport, several burnt-out elements of the plane's hull fell out, starting local fires on the ground. Supposedly, at this moment the fire destroyed the vertical trim controls. When the aircraft passed the town of Piaseczno, it went into sinusoid-shaped flight for the final seconds and nose-dived with a slight 11 degrees left bank and 12 degree pitch downwards, crashing into the ground at 480 km/h (300 mph) and exploding into pieces in the forest 5700 meters from Warsaw airport runway. (As the nose dive started very shortly before the crash, one hypothesis states that in the final moments, fire from the cargo hold spread into the rear part of passenger cabin, causing mass hysteria; the passengers moved towards the nose of the plane, away from fire, destabilizing the plane and causing the dive. Another theory is that rapidly spreading fire misshaped the hull in its rear part, which — combined with strong forces acting on the empennage - altered the plane's angle of attack and contributed to the rapid dive.) The remains of the plane were scattered over a rectangular area, approx. 370 by 50 meters.

11.09.47 am

Okęcie Tower: From your current position you have about 15 kilometers to the runway.

Crew: Understood.

Crew: ... to the left! Engines to the left!

11.10.13 am

Tower: 5055, to the left, to the left zero-five-zero.

Crew: OK.

11.10.40 am

Tower: 5055, to the left, course 360.

Crew: We want to turn. That's just what we want.

Tower: Keep turning, turn to three-six-zero. Now you have about 12 kilometers to the runway.

Crew: OK.

11.11.02 am

Tower: 5055, to the left, course 330.

Crew: We are turning to the left.

Tower: Start final approach about 11 kilometers from the runway.

Crew: We will do all we can.

Tower: Understood.

Tower: to the left, course 320.

Crew: Understood.

11.11.34 am

Tower: You've come to the right hand side of the runway centerline, continue left, course 300.

Tower: Wind is 290 degrees, 22 kilometers per hour. You are cleared for runway three-three.

Crew: OK.

11.12.10 am

Transmitter turned on four times; fragments of unintelligible utterances

11.12.13 am

Crew: Good night! Goodbye! Bye! We're dying!!!

The last words recorded by the flight recorder inside the cockpit at 11:12:13 were: "Dobranoc! Do widzenia! Cześć, giniemy!" (eng. Good night! Goodbye! Bye, we're dying!). All 172 passengers and 11 crew died as the aircraft broke apart and crashed.