Thirty-four years ago today, an El Al cargo plane crashed into a residential building in the Bijlmer neighborhood of southeast Amsterdam, in the deadliest air disaster in the history of the Netherlands.
El Al Flight 1862, a Boeing 747 freighter, went down on the evening of October 4, 1992, hitting the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg apartment blocks in the Bijlmermeer district. Forty-three people were killed: the three crew members, one non-revenue passenger on board, and 39 people on the ground. The true toll on the ground has never been certain, because the buildings housed many unregistered residents.
The crew were Captain Yitzhak Fuchs, First Officer Arnon Ohad and Flight Engineer Gedalya Sofer.
The plane had landed at Schiphol that afternoon to load cargo and change crews, and took off for Israel at 6:20 p.m. after a delay. Minutes into the climb, the inner engine on the right wing tore away. It struck the outer engine and ripped that one off as well. At 6:28 p.m. the first officer radioed that the plane had lost its number three and number four engines. The crew tried to turn back to the airport, lost control, and the aircraft fell on the apartment blocks.
Investigators traced the failure to metal fatigue. A crack had formed in one of the fuse pins that attach the engine pylon to the wing, and an inspection that June had not detected it. After the crash, operators were required to replace the pins with a stainless steel version less vulnerable to corrosion and fatigue.
The disaster left a long shadow in the Netherlands. Part of the plane's cargo was dimethyl methylphosphonate, a chemical that can be used to produce nerve agents, and questions about what the plane was carrying fed years of public suspicion. A Dutch parliamentary inquiry examined the disaster in 1998 and 1999.
In the Netherlands it is still known simply as the Bijlmerramp, the Bijlmer disaster.
