Talk:El Al Flight 1862

From National Geographic documentary
I am watching a program on National Geographic. It says that engine 3 ejected itself forward, and then smashed back into engine 4 by pure chance. A 747 supposed to be able to operate on two engines, but the damage to the wing disrupted the air flow in such way that the plane could not sustain sufficient lift on the right wing below a certain air speed. The pilot, unaware of this, reduced the speed to prepare for landing, which caused the plane to tilt 90 degrees to the right and crash. Comments please? -- H eptor  talk 01:00, 23 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, correct. The pilot, while unaware of the precise extent of the damage, was quite aware that the aircraft had altered flight characteristics and that there was at least some damage to his flight control surfaces. This is why he insisted on a runway that would take the least manoeuvring to reach, even if it was further to go. He faced the choice of going for a high-speed approach (which in hindsight may have been his only chance) or gingerly reduce speed and hope for the best. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:8500:46BE:5571:6668 (talk) 11:50, 23 January 2022 (UTC)


 * But runway 27 wasn't the one with least manoeuvring to reach. It was the longest (along with 24) and nearest, but required a sharp right turn (dangerous after losing the right engines), followed by a sharp left (hard after losing the right engines), a short final and that combined with a rapid decent. And indeed he couldn't make it, so he made a full circle. Least manoeuvring would have been 01R (36R nowadays): just a very wide right turn. That would have given a wind from the front-right and that runway was only 50 m shorter than 27. I don't think we'll ever know why the captain wanted to land on runway 27. PiusImpavidus (talk) 14:54, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

I simply do not understand the connection in sentence "[...] causing the engine and nacelle to tilt up and right due to gyroscopic forces, knocking engine 4 off the wing too." How would gyroscopic forces cause the engine to tilt up and right, and how this would affect engine 4? -- H eptor  talk 01:05, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

If you imagine engine 3 not attached to the wing but still spinning at high revs it will rotate completely - I believe jets generally spin clockwise, which would push it towards engine 4. It's the same principle as on a helicopter: without a tail rotor, the body of the helicopter would spin around as well as the blades. -- talk 14:05, 05 January 2007 (UTC)

dimethyl methylphosphonate
Checking the history, there seems to be a bit of an edit war on this issue. The current text states that this material is "used in the synthesis of Sarin nerve gas". While this fact is true, the material has many other more common uses. Picking this specific use and mentioning it in passing may be classified as weasel words as it implies that this was the intended use of the material. If any such allegations were made publicly they may be reported in the article and attributed with proper citations to whoever made the allegation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.8.159.153 (talk) 13:49, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

things to do on this page
I just added some translated text from nl.wikipedia article on "Bijlmerramp" and additional information to this page. I don't know how to make a real TODO Wikipedia list, but here are a few suggestions on how to improve this page as of the current date: I will continue to add translated text from the nl.wikipedia article, or if you would like please do it yourself. Let's make it a Good Article. plmoknijb 03:38, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Wikify the text
 * Add citations wherever possible
 * Polish the syntax, it is a rough translation from the nl.wikipedia article on the Bijlmerramp
 * Clean up according to Wikipedia style guidelines
 * Correct factual errors or translation errors

Wind considerations
(Sorry, not sure how to make a new section) This text: "Because the wind was from the northeast that evening, the fully loaded plane would have had to land with considerable tailwind" is completely wrong in terms of aviation practice. With a heavy load you want as big a headwind as possible, making your approach slower and safer with more lift through indicated airspeed for any given ground speed. You always, always, always land and take off INTO the wind. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.40.39.216 (talk) 16:10, 17 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I have clarified the text to explain that the tailwind landing would have ensued had the plane landed on 27. The captain clearly selected 27 because in his mind, the risk of the downwind landing (and possible overrun) was outweighed by the risk of staying up a few minutes longer. Crum375 (talk) 18:59, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

My understanding is that the pilot selected runway 27 as being the longest runway available. It wasn't the runway the controllers were originally going to route them to, because of the tailwind. So I think the goal of the captain was to use as long a runway as possible, regardless of the wind. Due to the need to decrease speed and altitude, they made a full circle of the city. Ultimately, it wasn't "staying up" that was a problem; loss of control occurred when they slowed while trying to land. Jororo05 (talk) 00:32, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

Death toll
Death toll in the summary on the right (47; (43 + 4)) is not equal to the other statements on the page (43; (39+4)). [unsigned comment, author unknown]
 * The official death toll according to page 9 of the official final government report (24 February 1994) is 3 crew members, 1 passenger, and 43 others (persons on the ground). This has been corrected in the lede, the infobox, and the "Official victim count" section. If anyone has good reason to think that this report is incorrect, can we please discuss that here on Talk before changing the article? There is a glaring error in the report in that it lists non-fatal injuries as being passengers on the plane rather than persons on the ground, but I am not aware of any reasons to vary from the figures reported for fatalities. Piperh (talk) 13:57, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I think the disparity arises from the fact that ASN gives the count as 43 (39+4). I assume we give greater credence to the official report? 86.5.176.168 (talk) 17:03, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

errors
I'm pretty sure that the total number of passengers does not equal 1. Some vandalism that has been overlooked, as it seems. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.231.128.137 (talk) 05:50, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) Cargo plane: only one passenger + crew + assorted cargo.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.204.68.130 (talk) 18:15, 11 January 2010 (UTC)

Complex uncertainties about the cargo
The anonymous (81.218.40.106) deletion of a paragraph about media speculation concerning the plane’s cargo has been reverted, with addition of a “citation needed” tag. There is a good reason why Wikipedia has the “citation needed” tag. In an article as mature as this one, one would think that application of this tag would be more appropriate than an abrupt deletion in this situation, where urgency is arguably low and an established community of editors already exists to participate in a discussion on Talk.

While the statements in the paragraph in question are indeed not (yet) sourced, the complex issues and questions concerning the plane’s cargo were investigated in considerable detail by the Dutch parliamentary commission on the crash in 1998/99. An entire lengthy chapter of the commission’s final report (Chapter 4) is devoted to the cargo; see e.g. Parliamentary Enquiry into the Bijlmer Air Disaster, Final Report, Chapter 4: Cargo (in Dutch). Media speculation in September 1993 about the cargo is specifically mentioned in that chapter of the report (section 4.1.5). There also appears to be little doubt about the presence of military cargo, as nearly 4000 kg of it is clearly documented in airwaybills (section 4.1.4), though none of this was classified as hazardous. The deleted paragraph thus serves an important function in offsetting the (as yet unsourced) statement in the sentence preceding it that “Dutch Minister Hanja Maij-Weggen asserted that she was certain that the plane contained no military cargo.” The minister may well have made that statement, but apparently she was later proved to have been rather mistaken in both her belief and her certainty. Incidentally, the commission was sharply critical of the extent to which the parliament was misinformed by ministers Jorritsma and Borst as well.

The commission’s report, and specifically Chapter 4 about the plane’s cargo, is very detailed and complex (in addition to being written in Dutch). Various elements in the documentation of the cargo turned out to be incomplete, and/or seemingly contradictory, and/or difficult for laymen to interpret correctly. Various glib and reassuring statements made by officials soon after the crash about the cargo and its documentation were not questioned until later. Once questions were raised, answers were slow in coming, and they then often contradicted statements made earlier by key officials. There were disagreements concerning authority and jurisdiction among various investigative parties, and requests for information about the cargo by at least one of the regulatory authorities investigating the crash were repeatedly ignored. All of these factors complicated the commission’s task, and those same factors also now make it a non-trivial task to identify those sections of the report that might best support the statements made in the deleted paragraph. Given a modicum of time and patience, one of the many volunteer editors of this article (some of them Dutch) could verify whether this report (and/or other sources) in fact support the statements made in the paragraph in question. I will try to find the time (in the coming weeks or months, not days) to sort out some relevant references myself, unless someone else gets to it before I do. Piperh (talk) 17:31, 19 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I think it is time to delete it. It's been almost a year since your last post and I don't think anything new will be discovered anytime soon, 19 years after the crash. --pastasauce (talk) 05:45, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Final Dutch government report
The link to the final (24 February 1994) Dutch government report has gone dead, and I have not been able to locate the report at any current government website. This may well be the result of recent reorganizations and budget cutbacks. Fortunately, the report was archived in 2008 at archive.org (ref 4), and that link still works. Piperh (talk) 14:16, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Blacklisted Links Found on the Main Page
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Cockpit voice recorder
There is an apparent inaccuracy in the statement that "The cockpit voice recorder, however, had been destroyed ..." The reference given for this statement is the Netherlands Aviation Safety Report 92-11, which states in section 1.11.2 (p. 23) that "Despite intensive search activities to recover the CVR from the wreckage area, the recorder was not found." While the severity of the crash may suggest that the CVR was not recovered because it was damaged beyond recognition, this is not what the official report states, nor is total destruction of the CVR the only conceivable explanation for its not being found. The wording of the article has been changed to conform to the non-specificity of the official report. Piperh (talk) 17:12, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Sources modified on El Al Flight 1862
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External links modified
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How many people died on the ground?
So for the longest time, this page has listed 39 fatalities on the ground, and with the four people on the aircraft, that leads to a total of 43. But recently User:Tigerdude9 has amended this to give a fatality count ranging from 43 to 47. He lists the official report as a source for this. Sure enough, in section 1.2, Injuries to persons, they have a table that lists fatal injuries as 3 crew, 1 passenger, and 43 others, a total of 47. However, this isn't case closed. This section is the only mention of fatalities anywhere in the report (at least the English version), and without anything to compare it against, that leads to the possibility that it was incorrectly written, and that the 43 was meant to be the total fatalities, not just those on the ground. There is some credence to this, as the table already has a major error in that it lists 26 injuries (11 serious and 16 minor) as part of the passengers.

However, you can only really come to that conclusion if you believe that the 39 ground fatalities count was correct in the first place. So where did that figure come from? Well, I've only barley looked into this, but I have found that when this page was created in 2002, it did list 43 fatalities. That may indicate there were sources before then supporting the 39 ground fatality figure, but if there were, they were not listed on the page at the time. This also makes it hard to use news articles and such made after then to verify the fatality count, as they may have just grabbed it from Wikipedia without looking further into it.

I think we all really need to look deeper into this and figure out what the total fatality count is. I know that the total fatality count has always been somewhat ambiguous with the apartment holding several illegal immigrants, but clearly they were able to come up with some kind of tally. I think it's best to start by looking for news reports and articles written before the creation of this page, or other things on the accident published by the Netherlands Aviation Safety Board. And if there was something in the accident report or within the history of this page that I have missed then please let me know. LearyTheSquid (talk) 03:39, 15 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Update: I think I found a potential lead. The memorial lists 43 victim names (including the 4 on the plane). LearyTheSquid (talk) 01:59, 6 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Another update: The 1999 Parliamentary Inquiry also lists 43 fatalities. They even have a timeline of the recovery efforts (in Dutch), which culminates with a total of 43. . Given that this is an official government inquiry predating the creation of this article, and that we also have a list of the 43 identified victims thanks to the memorial, I'm fairly confident that this is the correct official total, and I will be editing the article as such. But if you have any information that contradicts this, please let me know. LearyTheSquid (talk) 23:05, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Het is gebeurd
Both the literal translation and the colloquial translation offered are correct, but English speakers may still be left with the impression that the remark had some slight cynical or sardonic tinge, which is not the case. It is a common phrase in Dutch which connotes (among other things) that the worst has come to the worst; there is nothing to be done anymore. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:8500:46BE:5571:6668 (talk) 11:44, 23 January 2022 (UTC)