Air traffic controllers remember murdered colleague

Air traffic controllers across Europe interrupted work briefly today in memory of a murdered colleague and the victims of a midair collision for which he has been partly blamed.

At Zurich international airport, near the home of the Danish-born air traffic controller who was stabbed to death at his home, the observance included one-minute shutdown of takeoffs.

Swiss officials have arrested Vitaly Kaloyev, a 48-year-old Russian architect who lost his wife and two children in the crash.

They suspect him of stabbing the controller to death.

In other countries the radio transmissions of air traffic controllers went silent at 1pm, the start of the funeral service near Copenhagen.

As elsewhere, Norwegian controllers served notice ahead of time that they would stop transmissions.

Among the countries participating in the observance were Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

Employees of the 31-nation Eurocontrol coordinating body in Maastricht, the Netherlands, observed the tribute, but staff on the radar operations kept working “for obvious safety reasons,” said spokeswoman Kyla Evans.

“Staff at radar control told pilots they were thinking of the controller. Only staff not in contact with radar observed a minute’s silence,” Evans said.

The observance by the Swiss controllers who remained behind was intended to have a negligible effect on air traffic while they paid “a last tribute to their colleague who was murdered in front of his home in Zurich on February 24,” said a statement by the country’s three controllers associations - Skycontrol, Aerocontrol and APTC.

Nielsen was working alone in the Zurich control room on July 1, 2002, when a Russian jetliner collided with a cargo plane in air space for which he was responsible over Ueberlingen in southern Germany.

The accident killed 71 people, including 45 Russian schoolchildren headed for a vacation in Spain.