They were going home. One hundred and six Europeans -- Danes, Finns, Norwegians, Swedes, and West Germans -- had spent their holidays in Ceylon, the island nation now called Sri Lanka. On March 14, 1972, they boarded a Sterling Airways charter flight in Colombo for the long journey back to Copenhagen, with refueling stops scheduled in Bombay, Dubai, and Ankara. None of them would arrive. In the darkness above the Hajar Mountains, Flight 296 flew into a mountain ridge near Al Hail in the Emirate of Fujairah. All 112 passengers and crew died.
The aircraft was a Sud Aviation SE-210 Caravelle 10B3, registration OY-STL, powered by two Pratt & Whitney JT8D-9 engines. It was not quite two years old, having made its first flight on May 10, 1970. The Caravelle had accumulated 6,674 hours and 2,373 landings -- a relatively young airframe. Its most recent major overhaul had been performed on February 8, 1972, just five weeks before the accident. The last A and B technical inspections were completed just the day before departure, on March 13, in Copenhagen and again in Bombay.
The flight was chartered by Tjaereborg Rejser, a Danish tour company. Flight 296 departed Colombo at 17:20 local time and landed in Bombay at 19:45. The passengers were not allowed to deplane during the refueling stop. Captain Ole Jorgensen, 35, and First Officer Jorgen Pedersen, 30, were at the controls when the aircraft departed Bombay at 21:20 for the next leg to Dubai. Somewhere on the approach, in the darkness over the rugged terrain of the eastern UAE, the crew descended too early.
The investigation attributed the crash to pilot error -- specifically, controlled flight into terrain. The mountain ridge near Al Hail, in the Emirate of Fujairah, stands between the coast and Dubai. In 1972, the UAE was barely a year old, and aviation infrastructure in the region was rudimentary. The terrain around Fujairah is unforgiving: the Hajar Mountains rise sharply from the coastal plain, and in darkness without modern ground-proximity warning systems, a miscalculation in altitude or position could prove fatal in seconds. For Flight 296, it did.
Sterling Airways Flight 296 remains tied with Gulf Air Flight 771 as the deadliest air disaster in United Arab Emirates history, with 112 people killed in each. It is also the deadliest accident ever involving a Sud Aviation Caravelle, the elegant French-built jetliner that was among the first short-haul jets in European aviation. The crash occurred just months after the UAE's founding on December 2, 1971, before the young federation had established the aviation safety apparatus that modern states take for granted. For the families in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and West Germany, the loss was intimate and particular: parents, siblings, friends who had gone on holiday and never came back. A memorial to the 112 stands near the crash site in the mountains of Fujairah.
The crash site is located at approximately 25.07N, 56.36E on a mountain ridge near Al Hail, Fujairah, UAE. The terrain is rugged Hajar Mountain foothills rising sharply from the coastal plain. Nearest airport is Fujairah International (OMFJ). Extreme caution is warranted when flying low in this area due to rapidly rising terrain.