LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055

LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Warsaw to New York City. In the late-morning hours of 9 May 1987, the Ilyushin Il-62 operating the flight crashed in the Kabaty Woods nature reserve on the outskirts of Warsaw around 54 minutes after departure. All 183 passengers and crew on board were killed in the crash, making it the deadliest accident involving an Ilyushin Il-62, and the deadliest aviation disaster in Polish history.

The accident was determined to have been caused by the disintegration of an engine shaft due to faulty bearings. This led to a catastrophic failure of the two left engines and then an onboard fire, both of which eventually destroyed all flight-control systems.

Accident summary

The flight to San Francisco via New York City took off from runway 33 at Okęcie Airport at 10:18 AM CEST. The crew was cleared to climb to 31000 ft, on a course set to Grudziądz VHF omnidirectional range (VOR), which was reached at 26500 ft. Soon after Flight 5055 took off from Warsaw, the crew was instructed by air traffic control (ATC) to climb to an altitude of 18000 ft as quickly as possible:

At that moment, the crew applied maximum thrust on the engines to climb to 18000 ft. Nine minutes after the thrust was applied, as the aircraft had just passed Lipinki village, near Warlubie (near Grudziądz), at 8200 m, at a speed of 810 km/h), the faulty bearings inside the number 2 engine reached temperatures of about 1000 C and 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, exploded. Debris from the explosion violently spread around, puncturing the fuselage, severing flight controls and electrical cables, and causing severe damage to the adjoining engine number 1—the outer left one, which soon also started to burn. A piece of hot 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 the pitch trim remained operative—and that two engines were disabled. The reasons for this were unknown to the crew; they initially suspected that the aircraft could have been hit by something, possibly another aircraft. The pilots started an emergency descent to 13200 ft. The closest airport where the 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 aircraft on that day was 167 tons, until 10:41 about 6 tons of fuel were consumed; the maximum landing weight of the Il-62M was 107 tons), so they turned their heading to Okęcie, instead. Due to the damaged electrical system, the crew had problems with fuel dumping, and they did not realize that the fire had spread to the cargo holds in the back of the aircraft (cargo holds 4 and 6), and in the final minutes probably spread into the passenger cabin.

Initially, the crew intended to land at the military airport in Modlin, but at the final moment, they decided to return to Okęcie, which had better emergency equipment. Why the crew decided to continue the flight to Warsaw was initially unclear at the time, given the rapidly spreading fire and lost flight controls, rather than land as quickly as possible at Modlin. Modlin's emergency equipment was not as good as Okęcie's, 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. Instead, the cause was later determined to be the damage to the electrical systems preventing both the fire detectors in the cargo hold and inside the engine from working properly (on the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), an engine fire warning 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), 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.

At 10:53, fuel vapors that had drifted into the burning cargo from the damaged fuel tanks exploded.

The passengers were fully aware of the emergency; 58-year-old passenger Halina Domeracka managed to write on the opening page of her New Testament: "9.05.1987 The aircraft's damaged... God, what will happen now... Halina Domeracka, R. Tagore St., Warsaw..."

The last words inside the cockpit recorded by ATC 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.