Partnair Flight 394

Partnair Flight 394 was a chartered plane flight which crashed on September 8 1989 off the coast of Denmark 30 km north of Hirtshals. All the 50 passengers and 5 crew members onboard the aircraft perished, making it the worst civilian airline disaster involving an all-Norwegian airline company.

Aircraft

The aircraft, registered LN-PAA, was a 36 year old Convair 580 operated by the charter airline Partnair owned by the brothers Rolf and Terje Thoresen. The plane had switched owners several times and had multiple previous registrations, N73128, N5120, N51207, HR-SAX, N9012J, N770PR and C-GKFT . The plane had been in an accident before and rebuilt . Partnair purchased the aircraft from Canada in 1986.

Flight

The plane was en-route from Oslo Fornebu to Hamburg. The passengers were employees of the shipping company Wilhelmsen Lines who were flying to Hamburg for the launching ceremony of a new ship. The plane flew over Skagerak but as it neared the Danish coastline the tail section of the aircraft started to shake and finally fell off. The Convair crashed into the sea soon afterwards.

Investigation

About 90% of the aircraft was recovered and reassembled. Two different theories have been made for the cause of the crash.

The conclusion from the official disaster investigation team was that the plane had been poorly maintained, in particular that the bolts used to secure the tail section were counterfeit and inferior to the parts which should have been used. The metal in the bolts was not strong enough and failed when resonant vibration occurred in the auxiliary power unit.

Another theory was that an F-16 fighter jet had flown too close and at supersonic speed near the Partnair plane, thereby damaging it. This was the theory favored by the owners and Flygtekniska Försöksanstalten, a Swedish aviation technology research facility, said that there was a 60% chance of this being the cause. The Thoresen brothers filed a lawsuit but a ruling in the Norwegian lagmannsrett (intermediate court) called this theory unproven in 2004.

The airline company Partnair, already in financial trouble before the crash, went out of business shortly after the disaster.

References

• New information on 1989 Norwegian crash revealed.
• Lagmannsretten rules against the Partnair owners (in Norwegian)
• Aviation-safety.net entry on the Partnair crash
• Article by Snorre Sklet on major Norwegian disasters (see page 139, PDF file, article is in Norwegian)

Airline production list of Convair props (zip file, Excel spreadsheet) Letter in the Norwegian parliament to the Minister of Communications (in Norwegian)