Info search - 13x Il-10 crashes 1951

[alpha_india]

Visiting Berlin last week I paid a visit to the Soviet cemetery south of Potsdam. There are some intriguing memorials relating to an incident that doesn't seem to feature in the English language areas of the web.

From what I can determine (from mostly re-hashings of the same source), on 14th April 1951 a flight of Il-10s took-off from Reinsdorf for the target range at Lieberoser Heide. Thirteen aircraft crashed in the vicinity of Kemlitz for reasons not determined/published for the loss of 26 aircrew.

Sixteen aircrew are commemorated on this one memorial, another six on an adjacent memorial plot..



Can anyone shed any further information on this incident? Any information would be gratefully received

Thanks.

[1marshn30]

HI alpha india I don't know about the incident but it is an impressive memorial.
marshn

[Mark43]

How interesting.

Please come back and tell us if you find out any thing else on this please.

[Amp]

As you may have found by now, there are several German references to this on Internet, but all are unclear as to exact cause. These question a heavy storm or possibly the wrong type of fuel. The planes crashed over a wide area around Kemlitz. Fuel would seem a bit dubious as each plane would surely have to have carrying the exact same amount and using it at the exact same rate.... No idea how big the storm was either.....

[alpha_india]

From what I've found there's principally one reference source that's used in a few places, with odd snippets being included in only one repetition and not others.

http://www.maz-online.de/Lokales/Teltow ... ei-Kemlitz
http://www.lr-online.de/regionen/spreew ... 62,3306661
http://forum.skywarn.de/viewtopic.php?t=8889

Fred Tzschoppe and Reinhard Wildau have apparently produced a booklet on the subject that's available locally in the area of the crash. Once source mentions that studies of meteorological data of the day shows that very unusual data was recorded across the area - favouring the storm hypothesis.

[filmman]

Incredible casualty rate, it's almost as of they were combat losses? But, the only "war" at the time was in Korea where the North Koreans had lost a lot of them. Must have been incredibly bad weather.
Filmman

[Seahornet1]

The only other peacetime accident on anything like the same scale that I know of, would be the six West Raynham Hunters in 1956....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Hawk ... t_accident

[alpha_india]

This is the adjacent plot with another six of the victims of the same incident.




It was the scale of the loss that grabbed my attention when I found the information that's available online. I hadn't really paid much attention at the cemetery, I'd made the assumption that each plot represented a separate incident and I was looking for dates of single plane crashes with crew and passengers. It's very difficult to believe that a single day peacetime loss of thirteen aircraft could be virtually unrecorded on the internet.

[ArabJazzie]

Fitting memorial to what appears to be a very tragic event!

Only thing is that this kind of thing piques my interest into areas where, if this happened recently, we would quite rightly keep our thoughts away from here.

Im not so sure about the storm theory, unless conditions were conducive to unexpected icing conditions. Also with the Il-10 being a bit of a brick outhouse, i would expect it to handle quite a bit of abuse, other than severe icing.

With consideration to the fuelling, i would think there are too many variables to point to all of the aircraft being short fuelled to a similar extent. What i suspect to be closer to the cause is what amp mentions about the wrong type of fuel. With the Mig-15, and no doubt other Jet types being introduced to the Soviet AF at the time, could the wrong fuel have been put into at least drop tanks for these aircraft? My reasoning is that these aircraft appear to have travelled a fair distance, which by road is about 220km. At some point in their mission, having used up a fair bit of their AVGAS, they then transfer contents of their Jet filled drop tanks then these sad events unfold.
Arabest,
Geoff.

[alpha_india]

I would like to get a hold of a copy of the booklet that's been produced and make a translation. Even if all thirteen aircraft were affected by the incorrect fuel in the drop tanks (a very good theory) I find it strange that thirteen aircraft (out of how many? that's also not clear) all failed to make a controlled descent onto the fields below.

[filmman]

It might be relevant to know how many Russian deaths occurred in the period June 1950 to the end of 1953 and whether it was unusually high compared to other adjacent periods in the cemetry. Remember Stalin died in 1953, East. Germany revolted in 1953 and even after that East Germany/the USSR was not an open society and publications were controlled, etc.
Filmman