Plane crash in Düsseldorf

In the Düsseldorf plane crash on 3 November 1957, a Douglas DC-4 of Luftreederei Karl Herfurtner (KHD), shortly after taking off from Düsseldorf Airport with two engines stopped and two engines running and with flaps retracted too early, sank, touched the roof of a building and broke apart in an allotment garden colony. In the process, 12,000 litres of petrol escaped from the tanks and partly ignited. Seven of the ten occupants and one person on the ground died.

Accident sequence

The Douglas DC-4 was to be ferried to New York with a stopover in Reykjavík (Iceland) in order to pick up a tour group there. The commander responsible on the first leg of the flight was KHD's chief pilot, Captain Karl-Heinz Stahnke. For the take-off in Düsseldorf he sat in the co-pilot's seat (right) and took on the role of “pilot not flying”, while the co-pilot, in the captain's actual seat (left), was tasked with flying the aircraft. The crew also included a flight engineer and two female flight attendants.

A second captain and co-pilot, who were off duty on the first leg to Iceland, travelled in the cabin. In addition, an official of the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Transport was on board who, according to Karl Herfurtner's account, was to carry out a routine inspection of the crew and the Douglas DC-4 as a representative of the aviation authority. According to the Ministry of Transport, this official was on board not in an official capacity but as a guest of the airline. The only paying passengers were a married couple from Wuppertal.

The aircraft lifted off at 7 o'clock from runway 15 (since taken out of service) heading south. After the aircraft had gained about 50 metres of altitude, it abruptly lost around half of its altitude over the Nordfriedhof cemetery with an unchanged angle of attack. The Douglas DC-4 then went into a continuous descent and, about three minutes after take-off, flew through the roof of the former Finanzbauamt on Hans-Böckler-Straße in Derendorf. After the collision, in which the wing tanks among other things were damaged, the aircraft crashed in flames into an adjacent allotment garden colony. On impact, the right wing was completely torn off. Forward and aft of the wing root, the fuselage broke into three main parts. The front and middle sections of the fuselage burned out completely. The six occupants who had been in these sections died immediately on impact and/or in the fire. They included pilot Stahnke's daughter, who was on board as a flight attendant. The second flight attendant, the 17-year-old daughter of the company's founder Karl Herfurtner, succumbed to her injuries the next day. The off-duty captain and the married couple survived the accident seriously injured. They were sitting in the torn-off rear fuselage section, which was spared by the fire. The crash also killed a woman who lived in the allotment garden colony; two other residents of the colony were injured. The building struck by the aircraft burned out completely.

Cause of the accident

On impact, the propeller blades of the two left engines (engines No. 1 and 2) were in the feathered position. In addition, the flaps had been fully retracted. Examination of the engines in Hamburg produced no evidence of a technical defect before the collision with the building. Likewise, the crew had neither sent a distress call nor informed the air traffic controller of the engine failures. The investigators of the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt assumed that Captain Stahnke cut off the fuel supply to the two left piston engines during the climb and feathered their propellers in order to test the co-pilot's reaction in such an emergency. In doing so, he put the aircraft into a situation that even he himself could no longer control.

Employees of the airline described Captain Stahnke as a daredevil with deficiencies in his understanding of aerodynamics. Even before the accident, he had recklessly carried out similar emergency exercises, not only on training flights but also on scheduled operations with passengers on board. This had led to conflicts with other KHD pilots who, like Stahnke, had received their type training on the Douglas DC-4 in the United States. There, the German crews had been explicitly told by the US instructors that, to simulate an engine failure, an engine must not be shut down but only throttled back, so that its power could be increased again if necessary. At the urging of other KHD pilots, Karl Herfurtner had repeatedly admonished Stahnke to change his risky behaviour and, three weeks before the accident, had also threatened him that he would otherwise fill the position of KHD chief pilot anew and dismiss him.

Two days before the accident, Stahnke had some …