The forgotten crash

I started reading a post on one of the Flight blogs, expecting to read about AF447, only to find that it was a completely different crash, that I honestly don't remember happening. I bet most people don't remember it.

On June 30, 2009, an Airbus aircraft, carrying 153 passengers and crew, stalled and crashed into the ocean at approximately 1:50 am. Approximately 13 hours later, the sole survivor of the crash, a 12 year old girl, was rescued during the search and recover operations. She was found clinging to a piece of wreckage.

The flight was operated by Yemenia, on a scheduled flight from Sana'a, Yemen, to Moroni, Comoros. Many of the passengers started in Paris, and flew to Yemen on another Yemenia aircraft, where they boarded the doomed flight. The flight crew members were all from Yemen, while the cabin crew consisted of three Yemeni, two Filipinos, two Moroccans, one Ethiopian, and one Indonesian.

The aircraft was an A310-324, that was leased to Yemenia in 1999, and reregistered as 7O-ADJ. It was 19 years old, with almost 52,000 hours, on 17,000 flights. It was scheduled to land at 2:30 am on this flight.

The aircraft impacted the water several minutes from the airport, in the Indian Ocean. Weather in the area had been bad the previous few days, and at the time of the accident, winds were approximately 38 mph. Some reports said that the aircraft was attempting to go around at the time of the accident.

In August of 2009, both the Cockpit Voice Recorder and Flight Data Recorder were recovered from deep waters in the area. The French investigators pointed to pilot error as the cause of the accident, which led to the Yemenia announcing they were looking for a third party to investigate (the aircraft had been inspected by the French in 2007, and found to have a number of faults with it), claiming the French were "attacking them day and night" and harassing them.

In 2013, the Comoros investigating agency released a report stating the accident was due to "inappropriate action by the crew during an unstabilized maneuver". Allegedly Yemen believes that the loss of the aircraft was due to hostile action, despite no evidence that it was.

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by Zaphod58


I usually try and stay pretty up to date with airline crashes but this one seems to of eluded me aswell. Thanks for posting zaph!

reply to post by Stealthbomber


It was shortly after AF447, so all the attention was on that accident.