Vergessene Katastrophen - Der Todesflug der IL 62

Video from the channel Andoreasu73 about Ilyushin Il-62, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 43:33. Language: German. Video type: Documentary.

Documentary from the series "Vergessene Katastrophen" about the crash of Interflug's Il-62 DM-SEA, which went down on 14 August 1972 near Königs Wusterhausen station, close to Berlin. It combines testimonies from local residents, relatives, Interflug crew members, firefighters and investigators with archive footage from the period, and reconstructs both the flight and the subsequent investigation and its cover-up.

The aircraft was the first Il-62 that Interflug received, on 22 April 1970, and was presented as the pride of the GDR's fleet. That day it was operating a holiday charter flight from Schönefeld to Burgas with 148 passengers and 8 crew. It took off at around 16:30; at 16:43 the crew noticed that the tailplane was no longer responding, and at 16:46 captain Heinz Pfaff decided to return to Schönefeld. While dumping fuel over Rangsdorf, the aircraft became uncontrollable and went down about half an hour after take-off. There were no survivors.

The GDR investigation ruled out both the version circulated by Der Spiegel, according to which the aircraft would have flown through its own kerosene cloud, and a crew error or an attack, the Soviet hypotheses. It concluded that a hot-air leak from an air-conditioning duct had damaged the insulation of the cables in baggage compartment 4, which had no fire detection. The fire severed the controls and the power supply to the black boxes, caused anti-freeze fluid drums to burst, and weakened the tail structure until it broke away.

The GDR aviation authority grounded all of Interflug's Il-62s, and similar heat damage appeared on two other aircraft. Ilyushin rejected the one-page report, which lacked its own evidence, but later added fire detectors with extinguishing systems, visual access to the compartment and new maintenance procedures to all Il-62s. For political reasons the report was never published: the documentary shows the note in which Erich Honecker agreed to "let the matter rest". The 72 victims who could not be identified are buried beneath a memorial stone near the crash site.