Dozens die as jets collide over Germany

More than 70 people, including 52 children, were believed dead after a Russian charter jet collided with a cargo plane over southern Germany, scattering flaming wreckage on the shore of a picturesque lake.

The Bashkirian Airlines Tu–154 from Moscow was bound for Barcelona when it struck a Boeing 757 from the DHL delivery service at an altitude of about 12,000 metres, German officials said today.

Swiss air traffic controllers repeatedly asked the Tu–154 pilot to lower his altitude, but he did not respond, said Ulrich Mueller, the Baden–Wuerttemberg state transport minister. The DHL pilot tried to change course, but it was too late to avoid the crash late Monday night, Mueller said.

Russian aviation authorities angrily denied pilot error as a possible cause, saying the Tu–154 pilot had years of experience and spoke English well so he would have understood instructions to descend.

"All the sources of the accident are to be found in the skies over Europe. I am 100 percent certain of this," Sergei Rudakov, the head of Domodedovo airport, said in a report broadcast on Russia's RTR television.

The ITAR–Tass news agency reported that many of the children were from families of high–ranking government and university officials. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to the relatives of the victims, and dispatched investigators and the Russian general consul in Bonn to the crash scene.

Toni Maag, spokesman for Swiss air traffic control Skyguide, told Swiss television the Swiss operators took over both planes at about 11.30 p.m. One of the planes did not immediately follow Skyguide's instructions to reduce height, he said.

The controller then followed up two or three times until the pilot carried out the manoeuvre but at the same time, the other plane received a warning in its cockpit and immediately began to reduce height, Maag said.

At Moscow's Domodedovo airport, Bashkirian representative Sergei Rybanov said 52 children, 5 adults and 12 crew were aboard the Russian plane. All flew into Moscow's Sheretmeyevo airport on Saturday, but they missed the connection to Spain and requested that the airline organize a special flight to Barcelona.

Tatiana Ostapenko said her Moscow travel agency helped organize a group of 49 people for the flight – 44 children and five adults accompanying them. One adult worked for her Soglasiye Tourist company, she said.

"We are in shock," Ostapenko said.

Axel Gietz, head of corporate affairs at DHL in Brussels, Belgium, said both people aboard the cargo jet, the British pilot, Paul Phillips, and his Canadian co–pilot, Brant Campioni, were killed.

Another DHL spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said their aircraft was built in 1990 and purchased by his company in 1999 from British Airways, which had used it as a passenger jet. It was equipped with a "traffic collision avoidance system" and had been subject to regular inspections and maintenance like all the company's planes.

"There were no indications of any technical or operational problems with the aircraft," he said.

The planes crashed at 11:43 p.m. (2143 GMT) over Lake Constance and all people aboard the Tu–154 are also believed dead, said Wolfgang Wenzel, a police spokesman for Baden–Wuerttemberg in Tuebingen.

"At such an altitude, it would be a wonder if anyone survived," he said.

Authorities said nobody on the ground was harmed, even though large chunks of the plane – including a tail section, an engine and pieces of landing gear – fell close to homes.

Witnesses said they heard a noise like thunder and saw a fireball erupt in the night sky, then saw large and small pieces of wreckage falling to the ground and into Lake Constance. Scattered fires were sparked in the rural area, but there were no casualties on the ground, authorities said.

Dirk Diestel, 47, was changing his child's nappy shortly before midnight when he looked up through a skylight and saw a huge fireball in the sky.

"Immediately I thought that something horrible had happened," he said. When he went outside, a large piece of one of the plane's landing gear was lying a few metres from his home.

Through the night, rescue crews in helicopters used infrared cameras in an attempt to locate bodies and hundreds of people searched the ground. Eleven bodies had been recovered by morning from the smoldering wreckage, authorities said.

The smell of jet fuel permeated the area at daybreak, as rescue workers scoured the 20 mile radius on Germany's border with Switzerland and Austria, about 220 135 miles south of Frankfurt.

Search crews located the Tu–154's flight data recorder, Mueller said, and were hoping it would provide some answers about why the Russian plane's pilots did not respond to air traffic controllers.