Crash in the Ocean

On August 14, 1958, a KLM Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation was operating a transatlantic flight from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to New York, United States. The journey included two scheduled refueling stops - in Shannon, Ireland, and Gander, Canada. The flight from Amsterdam to Shannon proceeded without incident. When the aircraft departed Ireland, there were 8 crew members and 91 passengers on board. Among them was the Egyptian national fencing team, traveling to New York for the World Championships.

It was a night flight. After climbing out, the aircraft leveled off at 3,660 meters. About half an hour after departure, the crew received clearance from air traffic control to climb to 4,880 meters. One minute later, the controller asked whether they had another aircraft in sight, and the crew replied that they did. That transmission was the last.

An hour later, the crew failed to make their scheduled radio contact. Controllers declared an "uncertainty phase." Half an hour after that, an "emergency phase" was declared and a search was launched. However, about ninety minutes later, controllers in Gander, Canada, reported that contact with the flight had been re-established. The search was therefore called off. But two hours later, Gander advised that this had been a mistake, and the search resumed.

During the day, the crew of a Royal Air Force Shackleton bomber spotted floating wreckage and a half-inflated life raft about 193 kilometers north of the Irish coast. Civilian vessels that reached the area found no survivors. It was later determined that the raft had inflated on impact with the water. All 99 people on board had been killed. In total, rescuers recovered 34 bodies from the ocean.

Stopped watches found on three of the victims showed that the crash had occurred within five to ten minutes of the last radio transmission. The passengers had not been strapped in. This indicated that the event had unfolded extremely quickly, and that the crew had not even had time to send a distress call. Forensic experts also established that the people whose bodies were recovered had already been dead before they hit the water. Because of this, the media began to speculate that a bomb had exploded on board. Some linked the disaster to the military coup that had taken place in Iraq on July 14, 1958.

Investigators, however, found no evidence of an explosion, fire, or anything else to support that theory. A far more likely explanation was believed to be a malfunction in one of the outboard engines. It was suggested that metal particles had contaminated the oil system, causing the propeller governor of that engine to alter the blade pitch. As a result, the propeller may have gone into an excessive-thrust condition, leading to loss of control. This had already been observed more than once on Super Constellation aircraft, including within KLM itself.

A little less than three years after the crash, the Dutch Aeronautical Board completed its investigation. In its final conclusions, it stated that the exact cause of the accident could not be determined. The most likely scenario was a malfunction of the propeller governor on one of the outboard propellers, which quickly led to loss of control, while the crew had no time to counter it with aileron and rudder inputs because of how rapidly the situation developed.

In the Board's view, there were no grounds to believe that the suspected malfunction had been caused by negligence on the part of maintenance personnel, improper actions by the crew, or piloting errors after the failure occurred. After the disaster, the engines of Super Constellation aircraft were modified.