At 11:35 p.m. on July 1, two transport-category aircraft collided over the northern shore of Lake Constance near the town of Ueberlingen, Germany, at the Swiss border. Sixty-nine passengers and crew aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M owned and operated by Bashkirian Airlines (BAC) were killed when it collided with DHL Flight 611, a scheduled cargo flight in a Boeing 757-200 freighter. The two DHL pilots, the only occupants onboard, were also killed. The accident has the distinction of being the world’s first midair collision with both aircraft having operating airborne collision avoidance systems (ACAS), better known in North America as traffic alert and collision avoidance systems (TCAS). It was also the first midair collision over Europe since 1976.
BAC is a scheduled and charter passenger and cargo operator based in Ufa, Bashkortostan, a Russian republic in the southern Ural Mountains. The Tu-154M (RA85816) had a crew of 12 onboard including four pilots, a navigator, an engineer, two technicians and four flight attendants. The 52-year-old captain, Aleksandr Gross, was a Russian citizen but German by nationality. He was multilingual and had good English-speaking skills. A 12,000-hr pilot, Gross had about 4,000 hr in international operations.
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