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This is the story of south african airways flight 228. On the 20th of april 1968 a boeing 707 was to fly to london from johannesburg with a nunch of stops in between. The plane was to stop at windhoek, luanda, las palmas and frankfurt. If you know why planes stopped so much backin the day do let me know in the comments below. I mean most of these hops are well under the maximum range of the 707 so why stop so much? Well the flight to windhoek was uneventful sure the landing there was a bit forceful but nothing to write home about. At windhoek some people got off some people got on and the plane was refueled, the plane now had 116 passengers onboard and 12 crewmembers. At 6:09 pm the controllers were in contact with the pilots of flight 228 and they were giving the crew the information that they'd need for takeoff. Like altimeter settings, external temperature, that sort of thing. The controllers assigned runway 08 for the takeoff and the crew could just get on push the engines to max power, takeoff and then make a left turn and then climb all the way to their cruising altitude of 35000 feet in one go. As far as takeoff clearances go this one was as simple as it got. There was no lining up and waiting there was no noise abatement procedure, no traffic avoidance maneuvers, just a simple straight out departure.
As the jet turned onto the runway the pilots held short for a few final checks everything checked out and so the engines were pushed to max power and they were off. They lifted off with no issues whatsoever into the dark night over windhoek. As the jet climbed away the pilots retracted the gear and the flaps as the jet picked up speed. People on the ground watched as the jet climbed away, the dark night made it hard for them to make out what was happening to the plane but unknown to them the plane now had started to descend. It had not even reached a thousand feet in altitude but it was dropping. In the cabin of the plane all; seemed to be normal. Mr Thomas taylor who was a part of the Us state department diplomatic courier was seated in seat 1F up in first class and as far as he could tell there was nothing out of the ordinary for this flight but he was wrong. The plane was headed for some hilly terrain and no one knew about it. Then impact. The 4 engines were the first thing to make contact with the ground as they dug into the ground the rest of the plane disintegrated around it. In the control tower the only sign of tower were two small clicks were recorded on the tower recorder on the frequency that flight 228 was using at the time. Unfortunately only two people survived the crash. Even though the crash site was only 5 kilometers or thress miles from the airport it took rescuers 40 minutes to reach the crash site due to the rough terrain. That delay contributed to the toll of this crash.
The investigators of flight 288 would have their work cut out for them as this 707 was not equipped with a flight data recorder or a cockpit voice recorder. South africa had made CVRs and FDRs mandatory for most planes but there werent enough recorders to go around and that means that some planes were still flying around without FDRs and CVRs and unfortunately the accident aircraft was one of them. Thus they would have to rely on all other forms of evidence to figure this one out.
The first thing that they did was to make sure that all of the plane was at the crash site, right after the accident happened they started a search all the way from runway 08 along the flight path to see if something had come off of the plane while it was climbing out of windhoek. They found nothing. All of this plane was at the crash site. I mean this plane had no reason to fall apart it was brand new. Like it had only been flown into Seattle on the first of march 1968, a month and 20 days before the accident. Thus the investigators started looking at other reasons why this plane might have flown into the ground.The first thing that they looked at was engine failure. But the instruments showed that the engines were generating climb power for the takeoff and the components of the engine showed tell tale signs of being at a high power setting,