This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@juno.com. Warning Time Becomes Issue in Air Collision July 3, 2002 By EDMUND L. ANDREWS ÜBERLINGEN, Germany, July 2 - With bodies and smoldering wreckage scattered across 20 square miles of fields and woodland here, Russian, German and Swiss authorities argued today about the causes of a midair collision that killed 71 people, 52 of them children headed to Spain for an end-of-school vacation. The search for the cause of the crash, which involved a DHL overnight-delivery plane flying to Brussels and a Bashkirian Airlines jet en route to Barcelona from Moscow, was complicated by several factors, one of them Europe's balkanized air traffic control system, which involves 49 separate traffic control authorities. Stricken parents in the Russian region of Bashkortostan in the western foothills of the Urals struggled to come to terms with the loss of their children as they made plans to travel to the crash site. Many were tortured by the fact that the group would not have been on the ill-fated plane if a tour operator had not taken them to the wrong airport, causing them to miss their originally scheduled flight. At 11:30 p.m. Monday night, just five minutes before the crash, German air traffic controllers "handed over" the Russian plane to their Swiss counterparts, who were already tracking the cargo jet. Swiss and Russian officials traded accusations today, with Swiss controllers saying at first that the Russian plane had not reacted to their warnings until it was too late. Officials at Sky Guide, the Swiss air traffic control authority, said that they began warning the Russian plane two minutes before the crash and that they twice ordered it to descend, but that the pilots did not react until 50 seconds before the crash. But the officials later said their warning came closer to one minute before the crash. It "was not irresponsible," but it was "fairly tight," conceded Anton Maag, chief of tower at the Zurich airport. Even then, the Russian plane's descent might have avoided a crash had it not been for the automated collision avoidance system on board DHL's Boeing aircraft. It detected the collision course about the same time the Russian plane started to descend, and sent the Boeing downward as well. The outlines of what happened in the Monday night collision of the Boeing 757 cargo plane and the Russian Tupolev airliner left most officials convinced that the crash had resulted from human error rather than technical problems or terrorism. The midair collision created a fireball that lit up the sky and terrified residents of this bucolic vacation region. But nobody on the ground was hurt by the tons of flaming metal that rained down, some of it landing within a few hundred yards of houses and farms. Russian officials angrily insisted that the fault did not lie with either their pilots or their aircraft. "My theory is that this is the fault of the air traffic controllers who brought the two airplanes together in midair," said Nikolai Odegov, general director of Bashkirian Airlines, at a news conference in Ufa, the hometown of many of the Russian victims, according to the Interfax news agency. "There are no grounds at the moment to suggest that the crew lost control of the aircraft." The collision dispersed debris so widely that rescue workers recovered only 12 bodies by early this evening. Investigators said gathering the wreckage would be a lengthy process. A big section of the fuselage of the Boeing 757 crashed in a patch of woods in the village of Taisersdorf. Two of its jet engines landed on separate hillsides nearly a mile away. The tail section and engines of the Tupolev landed in a wheat field, while part of the fuselage and some bodies landed several miles away. Workers recovered the cockpit voice recorder and the "black box," or flight data recorder, from each of the planes, The Associated Press reported. Residents and vacationers here recounted with varying degrees of shock and disbelief the thunderous explosions and nightmarish sight of burning aircraft wreckage falling to earth. "I was up watching TV when I heard what sounded like this outrageous thunder, except that it continued for a long time," recalled Hermann Schmidt, who was vacationing with his family at a farm a few hundred yards from where a big part of the Boeing fuselage crashed. "I ran outside," Mr. Schmidt said. "The sky was incredibly bright, and I saw four things that looked like comets fly over the roof of the house and land in the woods. I ran back in, woke my wife and children and yelled that a plane had crashed and they should get out of the house." Shortly afterward, the fuselage crashed into the nearby trees and set off a small forest fire. The aircraft parts tore down tall pine trees. Flames leapt to treetops more than 40 feet high, witnesses said, describing heat so intense that people could not get close enough to look for possible survivors. Firefighters and rescue workers showed up within a few minutes, but they were stretched thin because plane parts were falling in many other spots as well. Firefighters extinguished most of the blazes by dawn. Today the woods containing the Boeing fusilage parts were blackened and smoldering as workers picked through debris and police dogs tried to sniff out the remains of victims. As of early evening, the bodies of the two crew members aboard the DHL plane had not been located. The two were identified as Paul Phillips, 47, of Britain and Brant Campioni, 34, of Canada. Oswald Schulz, an occupational therapist in the village of Deisendorf, said he had just gone to bed when he was jolted by explosions high overhead. "I ran outside and I saw three bright pieces in flames that were slowly floating to the earth," he recalled today. "They were very big pieces, and I was struck by how slowly they seemed to drift down." Diana Walk, who was at a swimming pool with her brother Sasha and a friend, said she had struggled at first just to make sense of what was happening. "We heard this enormous crash, and we looked up and saw this huge fireball," she said. "Several huge pieces were falling to the ground. I ran into a kiosk, saying that a plane had just crashed, and people said that was just impossible." The tail section of the Tupolev plane crashed and split apart in a field about a quarter-mile from a small cluster of houses that included a school for physically disabled children. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/03/international/europe/03GERM.html?ex=1026699306&ei=1&en=dcd49f29bbea94b2 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company