DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD

memorial at Ndola
 NO CFIT
Background to the Crash

A plane carrying the Secretary General of the United

Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, crashed while approaching
the Ndola (Zambia) airport on September 18, 1961. The
exact time of the crash is unknown, although it was around
midnight. The DC-6, named Albertina, had flown a
circuitous route from Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, to
Ndola, a large town in what was then Northern Rhodesia.
The purpose of the flight was to bring Secretary
Hammarskjöld to a meeting with Moise Tshombe, the
president of the breakaway republic of Katanga, in which
many western (British, French, Belgian and American)
investors had large stakes in various mineral deposits.

Those corporate interests had supported independence for

Katanga after the Congolese leadership, notably Prime
Minister Patrice Lumumba, had advocated closer relations
with the Communist bloc. (Lumumba, himself, was
assassinated in January 1961, in what some researchers
now believe was part of a Central Intelligence Agency plot
to get rid of him.) For his part, Hammarskjöld believed that
the Congo ought to remain one country, and toward that
end he was flying to Ndola (just over the border of Northern
Rhodesia from Katanga) to have ceasefire talks with
Tshombe, in the hope of mediating a settlement to the
conflict. Instead, his plane crashed in the darkness, killing
fifteen of the sixteen passengers and crew aboard the DC6.
One security officer for Hammarskjöld survived for about
eight days.
Since the fatal crash, various investigative instruments,
including UN committees and independent aviation groups
in the United Kingdom and Sweden, have looked into the
cause of the crash. The initial investigation, conducted by
colonial authorities in 1961, concluded that the pilots of the
DC-6 (an experienced Swedish crew) had misjudged the
night landing on an unfamiliar approach and flew the plane
into the ground. A UN inquiry at the same time, however,
failed to reach the same conclusion, although it was at a
loss to explain the crash.

More recent inquiries, including one chaired by Stephen

Sedley and with Hans Corell and Richard Goldstone as co-
panellists, have come to more nuanced conclusions, saying
that earlier investigators lacked a true picture of the
situation on the ground and in the air around Ndola that
night to come to definitive conclusion about what happened
to the Albertina. It has led to new inquiry, originally
supported by then Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and
approved by the UN Security Council, to reopen the
investigation under the direction of the former chief justice
of Tanzania, Mohamed Chande Othman, although for the
moment the budget approved for such an exercise is little
more than $300,000 (and the information needed is literally
all over the world). All of the recent re-examinations of the
crash have concluded that the first conclusions of pilot
error might well be in inaccurate. For example, the 2013
UN Hammarskjöld Commission, for example, concluded:
“There is persuasive evidence that the aircraft was
subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to
land at Ndola, which was by then widely known to be its
destination.” The 2017 report of Judge Othman concludes:
Based on the totality of the information that we have at
hand, it appears plausible that an external attack or threat
may have been a cause of the crash, whether by way of a
direct attack causing SE-BDY to crash or by causing a
momentary distraction of the pilots. Such a distraction need
only have taken away the pilots’ attention for a matter of
seconds at the critical point at which they were in their
descent to have been potentially fatal. There is a significant
amount of evidence from eyewitnesses that they observed
more than one aircraft in the air that the other aircraft may
have been a jet that SE-BDY was on fire before it crashed,
and/or that SE-BDY was fired upon or otherwise actively
engaged by another aircraft. In its totality, this evidence is
not easily dismissed.

Both reports cite evidence that British, American, French,

South African, or Belgian governments might hold but
which remain unreleased, and they urge its release for the
purpose of understanding exactly what happened to
Hammarskjöld’s plane. On November 8, 2018, when Judge
Othman last updated the UN on the progress of his
investigation, he concluded (with some frustration): “…the
fact that certain Member States have not responded to
repeated requests in 2018… or to engage with this process
at all, has a crucial bearing on the success or failure on the
full implementation of the above General Assembly
resolution.”It is where this case has gone—from the crash
zone outside Ndola to the files of the great powers—but
many countries, notably the United States and South Africa,
have refused to cooperate or done so grudgingly.

***
In addition to the various international investigations of
the crash, a professor at the University of London’s
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, Dr. Susan Williams,
has published a book about what could have happened to
Hammarskjöld’s plane. The title of the book is Who Killed
Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White
Supremacy in Africa, and it was originally published in
2011, laying the ground for the later UN inquiries.

In the book Dr. Williams lays out the facts of the plane
crash and outlines various theories—including pilot error
of the kind imagined after the plane went down—that
could explain the crash. She also talks about the
possibility that French or Belgian mercenaries had access
that night to trainer Fouga Magister jets or other attack
aircraft, and that one or several of those planes might
have shot at SE-BDY or tried to force the Albertinato the
ground (perhaps by shining spot lights into the cockpit or
by dropping flash bombs). She examines the case for pilot
error, noting that the pilots had flown a long way across
the world, beginning on September 12, 1961, when they
picked up the Secretary General in New York City). She
discusses the possibility that the pilots mis-programmed
the altimeter on the DC-6 or that someone placed a bomb
on the doomed flight.

Dr. Williams also examines theories that have speculated

on possible CIA interference with the Hammarskjöld
mission, making the point that the anti-communist CIA
had strong vested interests in wanting his African
diplomacy to fail. Dr. Williams ends her book strongly
hinting that her belief is that western mercenaries were
more likely than pilot error to have brought down the
Hammarskjöld plane, and she outlines many incongruent
aspects of the fatal night in Ndola, such as the closure of
the local airport (even though it was expecting the
Hammarskjöld plane) and the local witnesses on the
ground spoke about hearing or seeing a large flash and
bang before the “big plane” came down.

The Williams book is not a polemic for any one theory

about the Hammarskjöld plane crash. Instead, as a
serious academic, she prefers to indicate the range of
possible fates for the flight and to leave it to the reader to
come to his or her own conclusions.

***

In my case, after reading the Williams book in 2017, I

decided to visit the Hammarskjöld crash site outside
Ndola and to compare what I would see and hear there on
the ground with the words in the book. I had been
planning for some time to visit Africa and to write about
it, but having the Williams book in hand gave my visit to
Zambia a direction and purpose, even though I am not an
air-crash investigator or even a licensed pilot. Still, I
decided it would be easier to read the many
Hammarskjöld reports if I could visualize how far from
the airport the plane had crashed and what local residents
were saying on the ground about the plane.

Given the vagaries of African travel, I was not able to

spend as much time on the ground in Ndola as I had
planned. My train, from Dar es Salaam to the Zambian
city of Kapiri Mposhi, was three days late, and I had other
appointments in southern Africa, which made it hard to
spend more than a day in Ndola. Nevertheless, I did get to
the crash site, and there I met with some local
investigators and museum officials, all of whom had their
own ideas about what might have happened to the
Albertina. (Most dismiss out of hand that pilot error was
the cause.)

In particular, I learned that one local researcher had

spoken with more than twenty eyewitnesses to the crash.
Many of them were convinced that several smaller planes
had swarmed around the larger DC-6 on its landing
approach and that, prior to the crash, many people living
in the bush near the crash site saw large flashes of light,
consistent with the dropping of a bomb or bombs onto the
Albertina. But because these witnesses were African
natives of the area, their testimony was largely ignored by
colonial authorities in Northern Rhodesia when in fall
1961 the first inquiry was held.

For my part, I came away from the crash site unable to

believe that Hammarskjöld’s experienced Swedish crew
had simply flown the Albertina into the ground. Maybe if
the landscape of the crash site had been mountainous or
even hilly, I could have imagined a sophisticated group of
pilots—at night in Africa—making some fundamental
errors of navigation. But two things made me think
otherwise. First, the terrain around the crash site, while
not a completely flat plain, is devoid of any serious hills.
All I saw as I drove up to the crash site in a taxi and as I
walked around the memorial were open fields and small
clusters of forest land, none of which were very dense. The
Albertina did not crash into the jungle or a mountain; it
came down in the outskirts of Ndola where now there is
open farmland that is part of a broad African plain.

Second, I doubted that the Swedish pilots misread the

altitude of the plane, especially on a clear night. These
were professional pilots, and that’s a rookie mistake.
Nevertheless, early investigators in Northern Rhodesia
concluded that the Albertina was the victim of what in the
airline world is called Controlled Flight Into Terrain
(CFIT). But standing at the somber Ndola memorial to the
lost flight, I came to the conclusion that something other
than pilot error had driven the plane into the ground on
that fateful evening. To me it felt like an ambush.

I also concluded, while poking around the memorial in

Ndola, that my brother-in-law, Joseph Majerle III, is the
one person I know who could make sense of the technical
details in the Williams book and in some of the many
Hammarskjöld reports. Joe, as I call him, works in
aviation in Alaska, and in his long career he has visited
many crash sites and repaired many damaged planes. He
is also a voracious reader of history, especially about
aviation matters. Joe has also spent much of his adult life
talking with other pilots about various aircraft and their
deficiencies. If anyone could help me sort out the
complexities of the Ndola crash, it would be Joe, and
shortly after I got back from Africa, I mailed him a copy
of the Williams book.

Joe read the book twice, took ample notes, discussed his
thinking with other pilots in Alaska (some of whom are
still flying on the DC-6), and answered my questions in
several long emails, which I have copied here but which I
also have edited (although only for the sake of clarity).

Note of VER: some pilots, without being at the scene or

having seen the totally flat landscape of the area, or who
did not see at night from the memorial emplacement the
glow at the horizon from the runway lights are able to
conclude within a few minutes that the crash of the
Albertina was due to a CFIT.

What follows might best be understood as a colloquy on

the Williams book between two people who are struggling
to make sense of a crash that happened more than fifty
years ago.

***

Why does the Hammarskjöld crash still matter? It matters

because Secretary General Hammarskjöld had
undertaken his mission just as many countries in Africa
were seeking their independence from the colonial world.
Hammarskjöld was ahead of his time in pushing back
against what today we might call the deep state—that
confluence of interests between corporate investors,
intelligence agencies, and governmental power brokers,
all of whom were eager to siphon profits out of the
breakaway territory of Katanga. Hammarskjöld thought
that Katanga (and its extensive mineral wealth) belonged
in the newly independent Republic of the Congo, and the
purpose of his mission was to oppose independence for
Katanga, which otherwise would fall under the spell of
various French, British, Belgian and American
multinational corporations.
If you believe—as I do—that Hammarskjöld was the
victim of a plot, it can be concluded that the truth about
his death has been covered up to shift the blame away
from the usual suspects, including the CIA and various
mercenary organizations that were then arming
themselves across southern Africa. Hammarskjöld and his
liberal internationalism were getting in the way of
corporate profits, if not Cold War politics, and it was
decided—somewhere, somehow—to cut him down to size.
Maybe the plotters did not intend to kill him? Maybe they
simply wanted to scare him away? But the facts about the
Hammarskjöld crash have never been fully available, in
part because invaluable transcripts (picked up in
particular by US government eavesdropping on that
night) have never been released.

What follows are the questions that I posed to Joe, and his
responses, based on his reading of the Williams book and
his lifetime as a pilot and in aviation. Neither of us
pretends that what follows is anything approaching a
“last word” in the Hammarskjöld investigation. At the
same time it shows how much several concerned citizens,
and a budget of $1500 (the cost of my African train
travels), can discover. Let’s hope that the new UN
investigation can take the Hammarskjöld matter much
further. The Secretary’s exemplary life and work demand
that the truth of his death be known.

—Matthew Stevenson talking to Majerle:

***
Stevenson: Is it possible that pilot error was responsible
for the crash of the Albertina?

Majerle: The facts that investigators admitted to in their

original reports tell a different story from their
conclusions. To me, their conclusions are laughable.

This crash was not pilot error.

Per the chart at the beginning of the Williams book, it

shows the crash site very close to the turn-back circle (on
a safe instrument approach) of the official instrument
approach path, which means that the Swedish pilots knew
exactly where they were. I don’t think any accident
investigation board in the world would dispute that that
they were properly executing the published instrument
approach procedure for Ndola airport.

The official report admitted that they were at least

nominally executing the instrument approach properly,
except that they were 1700 feet lower than they were
supposed to be, and that was the pilots’error.

On page 70, according to A. Campbell Martin, the

controller on duty, the last communication received from
SE-BDY (the code for the Albertina) was confirmation of
1021 millibars—the altimeter setting—which is
something I and every pilot I have ever flown with has
never failed to reset at the instant we are told the new
number.

To me it is inconceivable that the Albertina pilots didn’t

know their altitude at that time. If the controller had said
he never got around to telling them the current millibars
setting, they would have had a basis to sow doubt on that
subject, even though that would have been a flimsy excuse
in itself, for the following reason.

Explain to me how it is unlikely that the Albertina pilots

flew the plane into the ground.

The radio (radar) altimeter came into widespread use in

military and commercial airplanes by the end of WW2,
even in single-seat fighters such as the P-38. I would bet
that, without exception, every DC-6 was equipped with
one when it left the factory. And it is the device you base
your instrument approach on, if you have one, because a
radio altimeter is more accurate and has large
graduations up to 1000 feet AGL (Above Ground Level).

Even if the Albertina pilots didn’t have a current altimeter

setting, they would have been using their radar altimeter
anyway, assuming it was in working order. If not, I think
it’s very likely the pilot would have informed the
controller of that fact. Which, again, points to the fact that
they knew exactly where they were, in all three
dimensions.

In the book Dr. Williams writes that an evasive strategy

to “lose height, veer and head for the airfield as quickly as
possible…may possibly offer some explanation for the
low height of SE-BDY as it made its approach to Ndola—
about 1700 feet lower than it should have been.”
This conclusion is at the heart of her book and research,
and any new investigation needs to focus on what she has
written here.

To me it indicates that the Albertina pilots were already

planning to evade an attack by getting low enough to
prevent another airplane from getting beneath SE-BDY,
which to an attacker is the easiest and most preferred way
to shoot down another airplane—and there would have
been no better way to do that at night than basing it on a
radar altimeter.

Explain some of the discrepancies between the official

crash report, and the data that Dr. Williams includes in
her book, especially in regard to the crash site.

The official report stated that the ground scar at the wreck
site was 150 yards long, which is 450 feet. The published
stall speed of the DC-6 with flaps down is 92 mph, which
is almost exactly 135 feet per second. That is the absolute
slowest speed at which it would stay in the air—not the
speed at which you would make an approach.

The original Jeppesen approach plate chart for the Ndola

airport would have contained a sidebar that would have
given the time, in seconds, required to reach the airport at
several different approach speeds, usually spaced by 30
mph and 60 mph increments, which simplifies the mental
calculations the pilot would need to make or eliminates
them if it’s practical for the aircraft to fly at one of the
stated speeds exactly.
I would estimate that, in this situation, for a light-to-
moderately loaded DC-6, the pilots would have used
either 150 or more probably 180 mph, which would be
220 or 264 feet per second of forward velocity.

If, as the official report says, the pilots misjudged their

altitude and just flew the plane into the ground while
making their final approach, it is beyond a stretch of the
imagination that 80-to-90 thousand pounds of airplane
would come to a stop in no more than 2.04 seconds, and
that every last piece of it would be contained in a mere
450 feet.

This is just very basic math that a 4th-grader could do nine

out of ten times and get right. It is an insult to human
intelligence to suggest that that’s what happened.

Have you ever examined the crash site of a DC-6 airliner?

Many years ago I had opportunity several times to walk

over the crash site of a DC-7 [very similar to the DC-6]
that crashed shortly after takeoff due to an out-of-control
engine fire in which the pilots tried to crash-land into a
recently logged parcel of land.

The fuel dealer told me that he watched as an engine

caught fire almost as soon as the plane started its takeoff
run, but apparently the pilots didn’t realize it until they
were committed to fly. But after clearing the end of the
runway, they immediately angled off and headed for the
clear-cut area, obviously in an effort to get the plane back
on the ground.
It had been nine years since it happened when I first saw
the site, and in that rain forest the vegetation had
regenerated quite a bit, but the wreckage path of the DC-
7 was still obvious. The crew had left the gear and flaps
down in takeoff configuration, obviously intending to put
it down at as slow a speed as possible in this off-airport
area.

My recollection of the debris path was that it was at least

1200 feet long, with no standing trees throughout the path.
The largest piece of wreckage at the end of the path was
stopped and literally wrapped around what was at least a
6 footdiameter tree, in the flight engineers compartment.
Control cables and wiring bundles were literally wrapped
all the way around that tree. I would guess that the site is
still that way today.

There are some fairly close parallels between that crash

and Hammarskjöld’s. The DC-6B and DC-7 are very
similar airplanes; sharing the same basic wing and
fuselage with the DC-7 employing another short section
of fuselage, more powerful engines and a higher gross
weight due to the extra power, and with a higher cruise
speed also because of the power. But they are both listed
on the same type rating for pilots. Sitting side by side, you
would have to study them carefully to see the differences.

In these two cases, both planes made it to the ground

before impacting any real solid objects; in
Hammarskjöld’s case it was the anthill and in the Yakutat
crash it was tree stumps. In both cases, the immovable
objects turned the airplanes sideways while they still had
a lot of momentum, which began the breakup process
while the kinetic energy just kept them going.

If they had been able to continue moving straight ahead

they might have had a chance, more so for the passengers
aft of the cockpit bulkhead. There isn’t a lot of metal in
the nose ahead of the pilots compartment to crush and
absorb energy.

The DC-7 was known to be overloaded with fresh salmon

but would have been light on fuel. Hammarskjöld’s plane
would have had a lighter cabin load but would have had
considerably more fuel. I would assume that the DC-7 was
somewhat heavier overall, but probably not by an amount
that would have required a significant speed difference to
stay airborne.

What I am getting at here is that in both these cases the

airplanes probably hit the ground at roughly equivalent
speeds. And the DC-7’s ground scar was about three times
as long as Hammarskjöld’s, and still had some energy
when it wrapped itself around a tree.

If Hammarskjöld’s pilots had inadvertently flown the

aircraft into the ground, I think it is reasonable to assume
that it would have traveled much farther before all the
pieces came to rest.

This did not happen, which to me indicates that the

physics of the official reports are all wrong—at least when
matched to their conclusions.
What can we conclude from the configuration of the
Hammarskjöld plane as it hit the ground?

The official report stated that the landing gear was down
and locked, and the wing flaps were extended to the 30
degree position. I would have loved to cross examine the
local accident board and ask them which pilots they know
that would be 8-to-9 miles out on an instrument approach
and have 30 degrees of flaps down at that point, to say
nothing of having the gear down. (See note above, in fact
the flap were at 30 degrees and the gear was down and
locked rather at 11.5 miles from the runway than 8-to-9
miles or still at the end of the reversal turn).

Thirty degrees of flap down on a DC-6 is a lot of flap;

probably about optimal for a low speed approach over
obstacle-free terrain to make a short-field landing.
Maximum flap down angle on a DC-6 is 50 degrees,
which you would normally only use to bleed off a lot of
excess altitude, and it would require a lot of engine power
with which to maintain altitude.

In my experience no pilot would drop the landing gear

until about the point that you had crossed the “final
approach fix,” in this case the non-directional (radio)
beacon, which is at four miles or so from the end of the
runway.

At four miles out the pilots would have had plenty of time
to drop the gear and double check it before reaching the
runway end roughly 90 seconds later. Experienced crews
normally do that as late as they can just to get there sooner.
This accident board didn’t even know how to lie to make
the facts fit their case.

Recently I had opportunity to talk to a friend of mine that

flew DC-6s about thirty years ago. He currently owns and
flies two DC-4’s, a freighter and a fuel tanker, around the
state.

He confirmed to me—as I thought earlier—that a DC-6

pilot would have flown that instrument approach at 156 to
160 knots (180 to 184 miles per hour) and would
absolutely not have had gear and flaps down 8 or 9 miles
from the runway.

And if he found his wing on fire, unless on short final to

a runway, his only thought would be to get it on the
ground.

What do you think happened?

To me, all of the admitted evidence (in UN reports and in

the Williams book) adds up to one thing. The crew made
a desperate attempt to save their lives by getting the
airplane on the ground, most probably because they knew
they had a wing fuel tank on fire.

A gasoline fire at night, to my experience, is very bright

and from the cockpit side windows of a DC-6 you can see
to the inboard nacelle without straining your neck. If it
was a wing fire, the pilots would have known it. It would
have taken all of their strength not to panic and just
continue to do what needed to be done.
And here I take issue with one of the advisers to Dr.
Williams—a Mr. Kjell Peterzén—who is quoted in the
book as saying: “There is no way he would have gone
down into the darkness and the woods…” I can name six
incidents here in Alaska since 1977 in which pilots have
descended into the woods, or whatever was below
including a mountain ridge, to deliberately crash burning
airplanes in an attempt to save their own lives.

In one of these cases—coincidentally it was a DC-6—the

pilot hesitated because he didn’t want to have to do that,
even though the cockpit voice recorder picked up other
crew members urging him to get the airplane “on the
ground, NOW!” But he didn’t. The wing folded up and
moments later they all crashed to their deaths.

In all of the other cases the pilots understood how few

seconds they had to live if they didn’t “put it on the
ground.” Remarkably, most of the crews survived,
although some had bad injuries.

I would say—at least from my corner of the world—that

pilots will attempt a crash into the unknown if they
understand how quickly an airplane made from aluminum
can disintegrate in a raging fire.

Aluminum, of the kind used in the making of the

Hammarskjöld DC-6,yields at 925 degrees Fahrenheit and
liquifies at 1225 degrees Fahrenheit. When the fire gets
much above the 1225 degrees Fahrenheit point, the metal
itself actually ignites and burns up, which is why there is
normally so few pounds of airplane left after one has
burned uncontrollably.
Pilots know this, and will respond instinctively when they
see, for example, one of their wings on fire.

What’s your reaction to the conclusion that the

Albertina was simply flown into the ground, so-called
Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT)?

As for all of the talk about pilot error and CFIT, I still
cannot believe that no-one ever mentions the fact that they
had gear and flaps down when they were still at least three
minutes from the runway, which you just wouldn’t do,
unless you’re planning to land “very soon.”

I thought it curious when I read in the Williams book: “It

was as if the aircraft was making a perfect landing…”
That conclusion is a very astute observation. That doesn’t
happen in CFIT situations.

In my experience, CFIT planes start breaking little things

and leaving little pieces over a long area before you start
seeing the larger pieces and more ground disturbance. If
you see something that looks like a landing attempt was
being made, it usually is.And this explains why the crash
site itself was so contained in such a small area.

In the Williams book, Virving states that “an explosion a

few yards from the aircraft could have dislodged vital
control wires from their pulleys…” My reaction to that
thesis: “Ah, no, generally not.”

All type certificated aircraft are required to have a cable

guard at every pulley station to retain them and to prevent
that very thing from happening. In all my time working
on airplanes (some forty years), I have never seen that
happen unless the whole pulley mounting structure was
ripped away from the primary structure, in which case the
pulley and guard assembly would still be hanging on the
cable. But that requires the wing or fuselage or tail
component itself to be massively damaged. In this case,
the airplane was obviously under control when it started
hitting the sapling trees—in order to be “making a perfect
landing.”

It has occurred to me that, in a sense, the British

investigators were right when they said that it was a CFIT
accident. But they left out the part that it was an
INTENTIONAL controlled flight into terrain accident.

Right now, it seems really hard to believe that the original

1962 UN report did not ever advance that notion, i.e., that
no-one they consulted ever suggested that as a possibility.
To me it seems obvious.

In any new UN investigation (led by Judge Othman) of the

Hammarskjöld crash, one of the keys to discovering the
truth about what happened could be found on intercepted
transcripts of the voice communication from the
Albertina, which, as Dr. Williams reports, were picked up
at a CIA listening post on Cyprus. How would that have
been possible in 1961?

In the Williams book, someone who was at the airport that

night states that while waiting for Hammarskjöld’s plane
to arrivehe “heard an airplane start up but never took off.”
I would speculate that what he heard would have been one
of the USAF DC-3’s (C-47) that were parked that night at
Ndola, and which explains how a CIA listening post in
Cyprus would have intercepted the Albertina’s voice
communications.

Here’s some background: At least some of the military C-

47’s that were kept in service after World War II had radio
rooms, for lack of a better word, that had gear that could
transmit or receive (or both) on every frequency from LF
through UHF. These rooms were state of the art. All of
this gear and their trays, mount brackets, and bulkheads
weighed over a thousand pounds.

In 1978 I did some work on a DC-3C that had recently

been surplussed, sold, and converted from a VC-47D. I
had opportunity to see all that analog electronic stuff on a
shelf for about a dozen years after that and was always
impressed.

I would suggest that the source of the radio conversation

that Charles Southall listened into on Cyprus originated
from a keyed HF microphone held into a headset speaker
on the VHF frequency of Ndola airport by the crew of an
idling USAF C-47.

They would have needed to have an engine generator

online to run an inverter because some of that radio
equipment was using AC voltage. And if it was going to
take very long, they would have run down the batteries
without a generator operating.
One of the persistent theories about the Hammarskjöld
crash is that mercenaries, perhaps flying Fouga CM.170
Magister or other aircraft, might have intercepted SE-
BDY on its approach, and either bombed it or caused the
larger plane to crash. There is speculation that a De
Havilland Dove might have been involved. What do you
think?

About the speculation that a De Havilland Dove might

have been modified to drop small bombs from above the
DC-6, I think not. That configuration has been tried since
WW I with virtually nosuccess; when it worked it was a
fluke.

In WWII, the Germans experimented with it a little and

the Japanese more, and all with a very low success rate.
The Dove also could have only kept up with the DC-6 in
the landing pattern; the DC-6 was capable of roughly
twice the Dove’s speed.

The Percival P.56 Provosts that were on the Ndola field at

that time and had forward firing armament could have had
some chance against the Albertina, but, as I recall, they
were not thought to have flown that night.

But a single tracer round from even a 30-caliber gun at

even 500 yards range could punch through the DC-6’s
relatively thin aluminum skin and ignite a fuel vapor
chamber that would break seams loose in the resulting
explosion and doom any airplane. The Fouga Magister
was known to have two such guns with a tracer in every
fifth clip of the ammo belts.
Dr. Williams cites some of the Fouga’s performance and
range specs, although other sources that I know give them
as considerably lower. But, still, if you ask me, this
operation was well within its capabilities.

When I visited the Ndola museum and spoke with some of

the guides, they explained that the Hammarskjöld plane
was flying away from the airport, in the direction of the
plane replica at the site, which is headed west. You think
it was heading toward the Ndola airport. Why?

I’m sure you heard the guide correctly; the problem is that
the guide probably does not understand what happened.
Which is really not at all surprising; even if the guide was
someone that had seen it before the pieces were hauled
away, the crash site would have appeared to be mostly
chaos in a big charred spot with a lot of garbage laying
around at random, especially if they weren’t familiar with
airplanes.

Can you describe the crash site?

The UN chart tells the story, which is corroborated by

Björn Virving’s account of the crash site. [Virving, a
Swedish citizen, was an observer to the early investigation
of the crash.]

Abeam the ant hill, way ahead of the main body of

wreckage where it came to rest, was the warning horn, the
primary function of which is to alert the pilots to the fact
that the landing gear is still up if the throttles are retarded
and is below a certain airspeed, and it is mounted in the
cockpit area.
Coming a bit closer to the main body of wreckage
(MBW), identified items are almost all from the fuselage
nose area, except for a small piece of heavy spar section
and wing fairing (fillet)—the spar section almost certainly
being from the left wing.

Included in the distant cockpit area wreckage is the radio

(radar) altimeter, I have just noticed for the first time. This
is where the pilots’ bodies start to appear also. So there is
no doubt now that it had a radar altimeter.

At the point about dead abeam the MBW, the airplane was
pivoting on its belly to the left, the left wing was folding
back and the fuselage ahead of the wing was splitting open
and folding to the left also. The right hand horizontal
stabilizer was probably catching on the tree stumps left
after the right hand wing mowed the trees down and
twisting the tail-cone loose before being sheared off
completely.

The tail control cables evidently held and didn’t fail in

tension in this case; otherwise the tail-cone section would
have ended up near the right hand tailplane.

The left wing, compromised not only by impact with the

ant hill but with the alleged inflight fire, is folded back to
lie alongside the aft fuselage with to me, surprisingly, its
engines in approximately their correct positions. I could
easily have imagined them to be found up near the ant hill.
The other surprising thing is that the main landing gear
stayed under it, in place, which is almost unheard of in a
wheels down landing out in the woods.
The chart doesn’t show, or at least so far I haven’t found,
where the main nose gear strut came to rest. Associated
parts are right where I’d expect them to be in the first third
of the wreckage path. The DC-6 pilots I know say that the
nose gear is a bit fragile; if it digs in to soft ground it will
fold up or tear off and needs to be treated carefully.

If the Albertina hadn’t had the misfortune to hit he anthill,

the skinny trees would probably have arrested its forward
movement in a fairly short distance and the passengers, if
they were strapped in, would have had a pretty good
chance of walking away.

If the chart is to scale, and it appears to be, the airplane

had already lost a lot of its momentum, i.e., it didn’t travel
more than about eighty feet or so past the ant hill, which
is not very far for a one hundred foot long fuselage. It
might even have come to a stop still standing on all three
gear. Just about like a Navy plane (on an aircraft carrier)
missing the arresting cables and running into the net
barrier.

The UN chart shows the Ndola runway orientation to be

magnetic 100 – 280, or only 10 degrees from east-west. It
says that the aircraft was on a heading (it should say
“course,” because a heading is a course when corrected
for wind) of 120 degrees, which would have been aiming
them toward the non-directional beacon, to line them up
with the runway. As I have said, they were very close to
where the instrument approach procedure wants you to be
for the procedure turn.
Can you hypothesize Hammarskjöld’s last moments?
Alone of the passengers he was found propped up against
an ant hill at the crash site, and he was not burned in any
way.

In my view, Hammarskjöld himself was probably

standing in the cockpit bulkhead doorway, behind the
flight engineer, who sits behind and in between the pilots,
facing forward in the DC-6, and all three of them would
have been strapped into their seats.

After bouncing over the ant hill, the nose would have
broken open as it would have been the first thing to hit the
ground, and Hammarskjöld, not being fastened in, would
have just been thrown out or fallen out through the
opening.

The still-moving, burning remainder of the airplane just

kept on moving past him, and was arrested by the trees as
it swung around. It all fits, really, and has been seen to
happen that way many times in history.

Can you sum up your thinking about what happened to

Hammarskjöld’s plane, SE-BDY?

I would surmise that SE-BDY (Albertina) was attacked at

the beginning of the procedure turn to return the plane to
the non-directional beacon bearing. (To me the attacking
planes had to have had the capacity to shoot bullets or
tracers. I don’t believe anyone tried to bomb the DC-6.)

The pilot then quickly decided to finish the turn back

toward where he knew there to be light and to get the
plane on the ground as soon as he could, knowing that the
runway, some three minutes away, was way too far to
expect a burning wing to get him to.

In my opinion, the pilots (by name—Captain Per

Hallonquist, Captain Nils-Erik Åhréus and Second Pilot
Lars Litton) came very, very close to pulling it off and
should be commended for their bravery and
professionalism. They knew what they were doing.

What would you like to see the new investigation of the

crash look into?

Keep in mind that all of the evidence from the crash site,
at this point, has been compromised, by age or the dictates
of the earlier crash examiners, who came to the wreckage
only with the intent to blame the pilots for the accident.
What we got from the first 1962 inquiry into the crash was
a political judgment—not the informed thinking of
experienced pilots or crash investigators. Since that time,
most of the primary evidence has been lost to time.

Most of all I would like to see the Swedish crew and

especially its pilot in command exonerated for blame in
this crash. As I said before, the pilots acted heroically and
professionally in trying to land a burning plane on the
ground in order to save the lives of their passengers.
Instead of being recognized for their valor, the crew,
themselves victims, was blamed for the crash.

I would love to believe that physical evidence of the crash

might help new investigators come to some conclusions
about the crash, but the fact is that the plane was made of
a zinc alloy aluminum that will have turned to mud and
paste after more than fifty years under ground. I am not
optimistic that the physical evidence will reveal anything
new in the inquiry.

Instead, investigators should turn their attentions to old

photographs, video, and audio recordings that might be
found in archives around the world, and from these files
try to reconstruct the last moments of the doomed flight.
They might also make a microscopic reexamination of the
original report for just the kinds of contradictions that
even a reader like myself picked up in some of the files
quoted in the Williams book. There have to be a lot more
inconsistencies in the files that professionals of today
would find.

If the files of the listening post on Cyprus were to have

any transmissions from the flight deck (personally, I don’t
think they exist), we might learn more details of what was
said once it was discovered that their left wing was on fire.
But cockpit recorders were not around in those days.

Please sum up what you think happened

In conclusion, let me state again what I think happened: I

think one of the mercenary aircraft, operating around
Ndola on that night, fired a tracer bullet into the fuel tanks
of the Hammarskjöld plane, causing the left wing to catch
on fire. Fearing that the left wing would fold up into the
fuselage of the plane, the pilots did the only thing that was
available to them: to configure the plane for a controlled
(so to speak) crash landing in the short amount of time
available to them. That action explains the 30 degrees of
flaps setting on impact (nine miles out from the Ndola
runway!), the relative slow speed at impact (they were just
above the stall speed), and the compact crash site (not
consistent with CFIT). The pilots had no choice but to put
the plane “on the ground…now!” and that they did,
skillfully, in my mind. Note of VER: nine miles on the
end point of the crash: which means that this operation
was started at more than eleven and a half mile or 17 km
from the runway, this is almost in the end part of the
reversal 45/360 turn!)

Had they succeeded and been able to tell their own story
at the inquests, we would now have a clearer picture of
what happened on that fatal approach. Because the crew
was killed on impact or in the subsequent fires, it was left
to colonial administrators—in places such as Northern
Rhodesia—to whitewash the crash scene and to blame the
pilots, who along with Hammarskjöld and his team were
also the victims. Exonerating the pilots would go a long
way in correcting an injustice that has lingered since 1961.

Finally, I hope the publishers of Dr. Williams’ book

encourage her to release yet another edition of the book.
(An updated edition did come out in late 2016.) Perhaps
she might be able to integrate into her book the more
recent findings of Judge Othman? I would hope so. As
much as anyone outside the UN system, Dr. Williams has
kept alive the tragic story of what happened to Secretary
Hammarskjöld in Ndola, and I commend her for all of the
excellent work she has done to uncover the truth. If
someone wants to know more about this case, her book,
Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and
White Supremacy in Africa, is the best place to begin.
Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books,
including Reading the Railsand, most recently,
Appalachia Spring, about the coal counties of West
Virginia and Kentucky. He lives in Switzerland and was
in Africa at the crash site in 2017.

Joseph Majerle has worked in aviation for the last forty-

one years, both as a mechanic and a pilot, and he has
worked on a number of historic planes. He lives in Alaska.
 It is said that the Fouga Magister attacks between
0913 and 0917 were done by José Magain. Other players and
Dag Hammarskjöld direct impact data One big enigma remains: Inquiries
ORGANIGRAM Where were the other pilots?
José Marie Ghislain MAGAIN and
2nd.Lt. Dubois ?

Dag Hammarskjöld KATANGA AVIKAT Kolwezi: Fouga

18091961:0015am September 17th, 1961 Albertina take off Luano. didn’t move on the 0918 night (?)
A few shots from Square Uvira by Victor E Rosez KAT3016 Do28 was in Kipushi on 0903, 61 and
Ndola
Dag Hammarskjöld not on board. Damage repaired went to Kitwe. Pilots Schäfer or Van Risseghem
Possible attack did possibly recon before the attack.
September 17th, 1961 Albertina take off Léopoldville
Direction Ndola. No flight plan with round about flight Welensky and RRAF: support Tshombe
to avoid Fouga attack. Plan was to meet Tshombe. Presence of multiple Canberra and Vampire jets

September 18th, 1961 Albertina approaches Ndola Presence of 3 DC3 USAF Dakota with radio
intercept (and radar?).
after contact with Salisbury and makes turn to land
Other intercept post was in Cyprus (Southhall)
but crashes just after midnight. Nobody is aware of it. Another was in Ethiopia
There are more than 130 witnesses a majority
saw beside the Albertina one or more other
September 18th, 1961 Albertina found Presence of a KAT Dove at Ndola. On
(jet) aircrafts. See Rhod. Rep. A/5069/add.1 p3 at 9.5 miles from runaway at 15:10pm September 20 many mercenaries were
or almost 15 hours after the crash. flown back to Katanga with it.

Delivery of aircrafts to the Avikat including

some Fouga and Vampire jets. It is not clear
if this happened before the 17th.

How come we all knew in E’ville that DH was

Who was that commercial pilot?
killed by a shoot down before noon while
Series of wrong info: Cable of Gullion. Cable the plane was only found after 15:15Hrs??
SE-BDY
that Irish fraternized with Katangese? O’Brien
CRASH SITE Meijer short wave interception at midnight
announced end of secession while Irish
800ft long
“He’s approaching the airport. He’s turning.
surrendered at Jadotville and Elisabethville. he’s levelling. Another plane is approaching
from behind-what is that?”
Belgian secret services manipulated
the exact times that mercenaries
returned to Katanga.

It was on the demand of Gen Muke that we fabricated

25 kg bombs for the Fouga in our workplace quartier
Industriel. Belgian colonel Cassart had already
delivered 1600 bombs of 12,5kg. See J. Puren.

Presence of British intelligence agency in the area.

Britain has refused to release the Ndola files. Along with Mr. Hammarskjöld there were the following on board:
Mr. Heinrich A. Wieschhoff, Mr. Vladimir Fabry, Mr. William Ranallo,
Belgium released some documents Dec 2018 Miss Alice Lalande, Sgt. Harold M. Julien, Sgt. Serge L. Barrau, Sgt.
© Victor E. Rosez Francis Eivers, WO S.O. Hjelte, Pvt. P.E. Persson, Cpt. Per Hallonquist,
Cpt. Nils-Eric Aarheus, 2nd Pilot Lars Litton, F-E Nils Göran
Wilhemsson, Ass. Harald Noork and Radio Operator Karl Erik Rosen.
? RIP