Überlingen mid-air collision (2002)

The Überlingen collision is the mid-air collision between the Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev and the DHL Boeing freighter, in German airspace controlled from Zurich. Shortly before midnight on July 1, 2002, the Tupolev 154M flying Bashkirian Airlines flight 2937 and the Boeing 757 freighter flying DHL flight 611 collided over Überlingen, on Lake Constance. The toll: 71 dead, dozens of them children from Bashkortostan on a holiday trip. The airspace was German, the control Swiss. In Zurich, a single Skyguide controller was working two positions while his colleague was on break, during maintenance that degraded the conflict alert and cut the main phone lines. He told the Tupolev to descend just as its TCAS (Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System) ordered a climb; the crew followed the controller, and the 757 descended on its own TCAS command. ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) later made the resolution advisory prevail over a controller's instruction. On liability, Skyguide is a limited company owned by the Confederation and entrusted with a federal task. It answers under the federal liability act, and the Confederation pays if Skyguide cannot. Skyguide settled with some families; others went to the Federal Supreme Court, which in April 2011 refused to raise the moral damages set by the Federal Administrative Court. On the German side, Bashkirian sued Germany. The Konstanz regional court held on July 27, 2006 that Germany was answerable because control of its airspace had never been validly transferred to Switzerland. In criminal proceedings, the Bülach district court convicted four Skyguide employees of negligent homicide in 2007. The controller, Peter Nielsen, had been killed outside his home in February 2004 by a father who lost his wife and children on the Tupolev.