Ban on coffee breaks could have averted air disaster, says judge

A SWISS court found four air traffic control managers guilty of manslaughter yesterday over a 2002 mid-air accident that killed 71 passengers, most of them Russian children.

On trial were eight employees of the air traffic control firm, Skyguide, charged with manslaughter for contributing to circumstances that caused two planes to crash in Swiss-controlled airspace above southern Germany.

The court sentenced three managers to 12-month suspended terms and one was fined. The remaining four Skyguide employees on trial were acquitted, the court said.

“Staffing the entire ACC (Zurich air control) at night with only one controller goes completely against air traffic security principles,” said the judge.

Switzerland has struggled to come to terms with the disaster, one of Europe’s worst peacetime air accidents. The controller on duty that evening, Peter Nielsen, was later stabbed to death by a bereaved Russian man who lost his wife, son and daughter on the flight. The head of Skyguide later asked for forgiveness and the Swiss president offered an official state apology to Russia.

A single controller was on duty shortly before midnight on July 1, 2002, when a Russian charter and a freight plane operated by logistics company DHL collided in Swiss-controlled airspace over southern German town of Ueberlingen.

The Russian plane obeyed Nielsen’s order to dive at the same time the DHL freight flight obeyed its on-board anti-collision system, which told it to dive as well, leading the two craft to collide at an altitude of 11,000 metres (35,000 feet).

The radar software that displays flight coordinates was in a restricted mode, and Nielsen’s only backup was on a coffee break when the two planes collided. During trial proceedings, the defendants said they had no reason to think Skyguide’s practice — now banned — of leaving controllers alone on nightshifts could prove dangerous. The defendants also blamed Nielsen for poorly handling the events that led up to the crash.

“A simple ban on coffee breaks would have been enough (to prevent the accident),” the judge said.