Here is a list of the worst commercial aviation disasters worldwide:
- March 1977: 582 killed in a collision of two Boeing 747s operated by Pan American and KLM at the airport on Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands.
- March 1974: 346 killed in the worst single plane accident when a Turkish DC10 crashed 26 miles northeast of Paris.
- Aug. 19, 1980: 301 killed in a fiery emergency landing of a Saudi Arabian L1011 jet at the airport in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
- May 25, 1979: 273 killed when an American Airlines DC10 crashed on takeoff in Chicago.
- Sept. 1, 1983: 269 killed when a Korean Air Lines 747 was shot down after flying through Soviet airspace near Sakhalin Island by a Soviet fighter jet.
- November 1979: 257 killed when an Air New Zealand DC10 taking tourists to the South Pole struck a mountain in Antarctica.
- Jan 1, 1978: 213 killed when an Air India 747 en route to the Middle East kingdom of Dubai crashed less than two minutes after taking off from Bombay.
- December 1974: 191 killed when a chartered Dutch DC8 returning Indonesian Moslems from Saudi Arabia went down in Sri Lanka.
- August 1975: 188 killed when a chartered Moroccan Boeing 707 crashed near Agadir, Morocco.
- November 1978: 183 killed when a chartered Icelandic Airlines DC8 crashed short of an airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
11.0n Nov. 27, 1983, 183 people were killed when an Avianca Boeing 747 crashed near Madrid’s Barajas airport.
- December 1981: 180 killed when a chartered Yugoslavian Index-Adria Airways “DC9 slammed into a fog shrouded mountain near Ajaccio, Corsica.
Three separate crashes each killed 176 people: A Soviet Aeroflot crash near Moscow in October 1972; the collision of a British Airways Trident and a Yugoslav DC9 near Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in September 1976; and the crash of a Jordanian Boeing 707 at Nigeria’s Kano airport in January 1973.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 28, 1985
