What do you think is the saddest aviation incident to have ever occured?

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upbeatelk2622@reddit

Air Canada 621. Poor first officer. And damn AC for the way they treated everyone involved in general in the aftermath. Tidbit: the DC-8 involved had ceiling panels that emulated starry night sky, so that is not a recent invention at all.

With Tenerife, I vaguely recall a PA cabin crew say on TV that she witnessed [trigger warning]>!a colleague get beheaded by a turbine blade!<or something like that.

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New-Link2873@reddit (OP)

oh my gosh,

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vanityprojection@reddit

Alaska 261 Air Canada 621

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upbeatelk2622@reddit

To this day I still call Alaska the flight 261 airline, and every time I think I'm too mean girl to a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth, they will do something that makes the news and confirms my badmouthing.

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Kanyiko@reddit

A little-known incident from ages past - the Four Brothers Ciselet.

The four sons of Belgian industrialist Herman Ciselet (1860-1938) and his wife Leontine Johnen (1864-1954) were all born just before aviation took off - Marcel in 1890; Robert in 1892; Maurice in 1893; and Charles in 1894. When World War I broke out in 1914, all four were in their twenties, and all four decided to serve their country.

Unusually for the era, all four brothers eventually became pilots in the Belgian Army, Marcel and Robert having initially served as infantrymen. Unfortunately, though, the Ciselet family would make heavy sacrifices in the liberation of their country.

Marcel, the eldest, fell in service on November 20th 1917, his Nieuport 17 falling to the guns of Erwin Böhme. Böhme himself fell 9 days later.

Robert, the second brother, fell in service on May 18th 1918, being shot down over the Fields of Flanders.

Maurice was severely injured during an aerial reconnaissance mission, and while he actually lived to see the end of the war, the nature of his injuries was so severe that he ended up succumbing to them in 1922.

Charles, the youngest, was luckier than his three siblings. Even though he himself was injured in aerial combat three times - the first time while flying an observer aircraft, crashing at sea and surviving, but losing his observer in the crash; the second time seriously enough that the amputation of both of his legs was considered, and the third time seriously enough that it ended his career as a fighter pilot - he ended up surviving the War, and remained involved in aviation afterwards.

On April 1st 1931, Charles Ciselet ran out of luck. While flying a newly-wed on his aerial baptism out of Antwerp airport - a gift of friends and family for his wedding - the wing bracing cable of his Breda 15 tourer plane suddenly snapped and the left wing detached, leaving Charles and his passenger Arthur Bary without a chance. Arthur's wife and friends were witness to the accident.

A few days later, Herman and Leontine Ciselet buried the last of their four sons - all four killed in aircraft.

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ChaosSurfer27@reddit

UPS Flight 6,

All of the events during that flight.

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cat-sniffer_@reddit

Westover Air Force Base KC-135 crash

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FlyingOctopus53@reddit

Tu154 full of kids that crashed with DHL 757 over Germany

Or parents that lost both their kids when 747 physically lost engines and crashed into an apartment building in Amsterdam

Or recent crash in Philadelphia when girl recovered from cancer just to perish in a crash…

Too many.

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Bortron86@reddit

The first of those also ended with the air traffic controller on duty (who was not found at fault for the accident) being murdered, in front of his family, by a man who'd lost his wife and children in the crash. Just a horrible case all around.

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Internal_Button_4339@reddit

Yeah, that's the one I'd consider as right up there for sadness.

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FlyingOctopus53@reddit

yep, tragic

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ANITIX87@reddit

AF447. So many people lost their lives because 3 people collectively performed some of the worst airmanship in the history of aviation.

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SMEAGAIN_AGO@reddit

Tenerife airport disaster 1977 …

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relayer000@reddit

Iran Air 655. Nobody in the West seems to give a crap, but the US shot down the aircraft “by mistake” and killed 290 people.

Can you imagine the outcry if they had been sailing in the English Channel and had shot down a European plane? But no, it was an Iranian plane, so …

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beegreen@reddit

Didn’t Iran also shoot down a commercial plane recently? I believe Russia did as well

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HughesAndCostanzo@reddit

All of them

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0butterfatcat0@reddit

Aeroflot 593. Such a tragic, unnecessary end for all. It would have been terrifying to be on that plane near the end.

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1_tommytoolbox@reddit

Helios 522 In 2005 a 737 en route from Cyprus to Greece airliner depressurized and the flight crew passed out. Two flight attendants (a man and woman who were also a couple) went on portable oxygen to try and force their way into the cockpit as the male FA was also a pilot. This was right after 9/11 and the cockpit door had been armored to prevent entry, so it took an hour of heroic effort by this couple to get through the door. Unfortunately as soon as they did the plane ran out of fuel. He guided it away from populated areas and it crashed into a mountain.

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Candenti_Papilios@reddit

Sky King

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RBarnstormer@reddit

Eastern Air Lines 401 back in Dec 1972. one burnt out indicator bulb distracted the entire crew of an L1011

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ThatsnotaVol-VO@reddit

For me personally it was USAir 427. I grew up in Pittsburgh so was a regular flyer of USAir as a kid. I was just old enough at the time to really start processing tragedies like this and the fact that it was my hometown airline near my hometown airport was pretty devastating. Also just the state of the wreckage and some of the first responder stories… still gives me chills.

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Build-A-Pilot@reddit

Maybe AA587, the one that went down near KLGA just 2 months after the 9/11 attacks in NY. I imagine how hard it must've been at that time to keep the public calm about flying (especially out of NY), and there it went, killing all the passengers onboard. It was such a preventable disaster as well.

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mhsvz@reddit

The Tenerife airport disaster^([c])occurred on 27 March 1977, when two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport ^([1]) (now Tenerife North Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife.^([2])^([3])The Incident occurred at 5:06 pm WET (UTC +0) in dense fog, when KLM Flight 4805 initiated its takeoffrun, colliding with the right side of Pan Am Flight 1736 still on the runway. The impact and the resulting fire killed all 248 people on board the KLM plane and 335 of the 396 people on board the Pan Am plane, with only 61 survivors in the front section of the latter aircraft. With a total of 583 fatalities, the disaster is the deadliest accident in aviation history.

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Av8Xx@reddit

Tamper who got her long hair extensions cause in a belt loader and died of head injuries. She had 3 small kids and here social media was full of her hair not tied back at work.

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chalk_in_boots@reddit

Might be a bit of a controversial take, but Sky King.

Guy who was a tow worker for Horizon was quiet and people liked him, but the wages they were getting paid were... not good. One day he just kinda snaps, steals a Dash-8, flies it around Seattle for a bit doing acrobatics, does a barrel roll, and crashes taking his own life. He was in communication with the tower pretty much the entire time, it was clear he was mentally unwell and just, life had gotten to him. One thing he said to them was complaining about wages and that maybe this would make the higher ups pay attention. You can listen to the comms between him and the tower, and it's scary how calm he is the whole time. Towards the end he says he wasn't really planning on landing.

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Heel-Judder@reddit

One mentally ill person committing suicide is somehow more sad than another mentally ill person committing suicide while murdering 149 innocent people?

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chalk_in_boots@reddit

I think it's more so that we have footage and audio. Yeah 9525 was awful, absolutely tragic, but the question was saddest. We saw it happen real time, the comms where you can hear Russell giving him a sense of humanity. He literally says he doesn't want to hurt anyone so despite flying over an urban area he was still making an effort to put only himself at risk. Lubitz had a chronic psychological condition, which while bad, is generally treatable. Russell was just a regular, seemingly nice guy, for whom it was all just gotten too much, no record of any mental illness. Just, knowing that for a lot of people, that could be us. You don't need a history, be diagnosed with something, just, such a public demonstration of how it can really happen to anyone.

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New-Link2873@reddit (OP)

Oh my. That's horrific :(

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