BP GEOGRAPHIC

Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, died in a plane crash in 1961 in Northern Rhodesia, nowadays Zambia. Now there are people claiming it was not an accident but an assassination.

Evidence is pointing to the conclusion that it was what is called a controlled flight into terrain. The cause was a mix of pilot error and an insufficient map. The map didn’t show a mountain near the runway and the pilots flew the Douglas DC 6 lower than the minimum safe altitude of 5000 feet.

Controlled flying into terrain is something that happened again and again whenever pilots didn’t pay enough attention on all factors. In this case a contributing factor was fatigue, because they were flying for 17 hours already.

Dag Hammarskjöld was posthumously awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.