The Überlingen Mid-Air Collision

On 1 July 2002, a passenger aircraft carrying a party of Russian schoolchildren and a DHL freighter collided above southern Germany, killing all 71 people aboard. In this episode of Compact Disasters, we follow the two flights towards Lake Constance, enter the Zürich control room and reconstruct the final seconds when a controller's instructions conflicted with an aircraft's collision-avoidance advisory. We also explore the emergency response, the families' losses and the investigation that exposed failures in staffing, communications and safety procedures. It is the story of how several…