KT BHY Headquarters Istanbul, Turkey Ceased operations 1996 | BHY BIRGENAIR Founded 1988 Fleet size 7 | |
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Birgenair was a Turkish charter airline company established in 1988 with headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey.
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History
Owned by the Turkish businessman Mehmet Birgen, Birgenair operated charter flights from Western Europe to several Turkish holiday destinations, initially with DC-8 aircraft. Later it served the Turkish-German discount travel and tourism company Öger Tours for flights from Germany to the Caribbean with Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft.
Massive negative publicity about Birgenair and other discount flight organizers in Germany following the disaster mentioned below caused a sharp decline in reservations, and finally the company went into bankruptcy and closed later that same year, 1996.
Accidents and incidents
On 6 February 1996 Birgenair Flight 301 was bound for Frankfurt, Germany but crashed shortly after take-off from Puerto Plata Airport in the Dominican Republic into Atlantic Ocean 26 kilometres off-shore. All 176 passengers and 13 crew members, among them 154 Germans and 9 Polish people died presumably instantaneously. It was found that one of the air speed indicators of the Boeing 757-225 was not working properly, confusing the pilots about whether the plane's speed was too fast or too slow. The black box, data recorder blamed the captain pilot, because instead of measuring the air speed through one of the working air speed indicators he continued with the malfunctioned indicator or did not turned back and cancel the flight, insisted to continue flying. The aircraft was leased due to a malfunction with the scheduled aircraft for that flight.