Dark memories of two plane crashes “awakened” by the Antonov tragedy

Dark memories of two plane crashes that shocked the whole of Greece were “awakened” by last night’s plane tragedy in a rural area between Antiphilippi and Paleochori, near Kavala.

The calendar showed August 31, 1995, when an Antonov military aircraft, due to human error, crashed outside Thessaloniki, killing all six passengers – four senior officers of the Republic of Mali and the two pilots, who had gone to Kiev for the receiving the aircraft.

The military plane, which was flying from Kyiv to Tunis, crashed into PPC power lines shortly before touching the ground, causing it to be electrocuted and its six passengers electrocuted. Unruly, it first hit the wall of the Agricultural Chemicals Residue Control Laboratory building and then its front end was pinned to the building.

At the time of the accident, there were bad weather conditions, with a lot of rain, and the pilot of the aircraft when he realized that he was not on a runway but on the E.O. Thessaloniki – Moudanion, he preferred to land it in the fields in order not to drag to death the drivers of the many cars that were moving on the road at that time.

Two years later, the crash of Yakovlev in the Pieria Mountains (on 17/12/1997) was to go down in history as the greatest aviation tragedy in northern Greece.

The Yakovlev Yak-42 of the Aerosvit airlines from Odessa, Ukraine, bound for Thessaloniki, lost contact with the control tower of the airport “Macedonia” and crashed in the forest area of ​​Ditsios of Pieria, at an altitude of 1200 meters.

Seventy-two people – crew and passengers, including 42 Greeks, most of them from Aiani Kozani, who worked in a construction company in Ukraine and were returning to their homeland for Christmas – met a tragic death, while intensive efforts were needed to locate the aircraft three days of research in the difficult terrain of Pieria, under bad weather conditions with snow and fog.

The aircraft was destined for Macedonia Airport in Thessaloniki when the pilot requested radar assistance to land, however when informed that there was no approach radar, he replied that he had found the correct track and was descending to 3500 feet. Later, however, it was found that the crew of the fatal aircraft was lost and due to insufficient knowledge of the English language could not communicate with the controllers, as a result of which it could not find the airport and after 18 minutes of pointless circling it landed in Pieria.

RES-EMP

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