Friendship Flight Douglas DC-7C PP-PDO disaster

The Friendship Flight disaster was an air accident that occurred on 1 November 1961. On that date, a Douglas DC-7 operated by Panair do Brasil crashed near Recife Airport, leaving a toll of 45 dead and 43 injured.

Accident

The Douglas DC-7C registered PP-PDO took off from Lisbon (Portela) airport at around 16:00 (local time) on 31 October bound for Recife, making a stopover 6 hours after takeoff at Sal Island International Aerodrome, located in the then province of Cape Verde. After taking off from Sal Aerodrome, it would fly another 6 hours to Guararapes International Airport in Recife. At around 02:00 in the morning (local time), PP-PDO informed the Guararapes Airport control tower that it was awaiting landing instructions. The tower directed it to land on runway 15/33, about 2300 m long. During the approach, the aircraft was flying below the minimum safe ceiling and at 2:12 struck the top of a tree, about 2 km from the threshold of runway 15, catching fire immediately afterwards. In the impact 45 of the 88 occupants of the aircraft would die. A renowned PanAir captain of the time, Hugo Tenan, with twenty thousand flight hours, was among the crew members killed; he had flown from Lisbon to Cape Verde and afterwards sat down and remained only as a non-operating crew member from Cape Verde to Recife. After the DC-7C crashed, Hugo Tenan reportedly survived the impact and helped rescue other survivors, and when he went back to the aircraft to check whether there were more victims and to help them, the Douglas DC-7C, which had already broken into two pieces, exploded.