Partnair Flight 394 was a chartered flight that crashed on 8 September 1989 off the coast of Denmark, north of Hirtshals. All fifty passengers and five crew members on board the aircraft died, making this the deadliest disaster in Danish aviation history. The crash was caused by improper maintenance and use of counterfeit aircraft parts.
Aircraft and crew
The accident aircraft, registered as LN-PAA, was a 36-year-old Convair CV-580 operated by the Norwegian charter airline Partnair. The plane had switched owners several times, had undergone various modifications, had had multiple previous registrations (N73128, EC-FDP, PK-GDS, HR-SAX, JA101C, N770PR, and C-GKFT), and had been rebuilt after a landing accident in 1978. The most significant modification was a change from piston to turboprop engines in 1960; this added more horsepower to the aircraft. The owner of the aircraft preceding its sale to Partnair was a Canadian company that specialized in servicing Convairs. LN-PAA was one of the aircraft most recently acquired by Partnair. At the time of the crash, two other Convair 580s were in the Partnair fleet.
The flight crew consisted of Captain Knut Tveiten and First Officer Finn Petter Berg, both aged 59. Tveiten and Berg were close friends who had flown together for years. Both pilots were very experienced, with close to 17,000 successful flight hours each. Berg was also Partnair's flight operations manager.
Background
At the time of the accident, Partnair was in financial difficulty. The airline's debts were such that, on the day of the accident flight, Norwegian aviation authorities had notified Norwegian airports to not allow Partnair aircraft to depart because the airline had not paid several charges and fees.
Flight
Flight 394 was en route from Oslo Airport, Fornebu, Norway, to Hamburg Airport, West Germany. The passengers were employees of the shipping company Wilhelmsen Lines, who were flying to Hamburg for the launching ceremony of a new ship. Half of the employees of Wilhelmsen's head office were on board. Leif Terje Løddesøl, an executive of Wilhelmsen, said that the atmosphere in the company was "very, very good" prior to the accident flight and that some of the employees "maybe" had been to prior launching ceremonies, which he described as "quite exciting". A regular employee on the flight, one of the top-performing employees in Wilhelmsen, had been asked to give the speech during the ceremony. Løddesøl said that a "normal person" in the company was not often chosen to read the speech on such an occasion.
Before the flight, the Partnair crew found that one of LN-PAA's two main power generators was defective and had been so since 6 September. Also, the mechanic who had inspected the aircraft was unable to repair it. In the Norwegian jurisdiction an aircraft is only allowed to take off if it has two operable sources of power. Also, the aircraft's minimum equipment list required two operating generators. Berg decided that he would run the auxiliary power unit (APU) throughout the flight so that the plane would have two sources of power and therefore be allowed to leave.
Oslo Airport refused to let Flight 394 depart until a catering bill was paid. Before the aircraft took off, Berg left the cockpit to pay the catering company. As a result of this, the flight was delayed by almost an hour, finally departing at 3:59 pm.
As Flight 394 passed over the water at its planned cruising altitude of , a Norwegian F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet passed by it. The F-16 pilot was startled by the sudden appearance of the aircraft and contacted Oslo air traffic control, believing his radar data to be false and that the aircraft was closer to his jet than his on-board computer had indicated.
As Flight 394 neared the Danish coastline, 22,000 feet over the North Sea, Copenhagen air traffic control saw that the plane was off course and falling quickly, appearing to crash into the sea, roughly north of the Danish coast.
Investigation
Accident Investigation Board Norway (AIBN) investigated the disaster and recovered 50 of the 55 bodies before sending them through autopsies in Denmark. Investigators used side-scan sonar to plot positions of wreckage. The pieces had settled over an area wide, leading the investigators to believe that LN-PAA disintegrated in the air. Luckily, 90% of the aircraft could be reconstructed.