World’s Worst Commercial Air Crashes

Here is a list of the worst commercial aviation disasters worldwide:

1. March, 1977: 582 killed in a collision of two Boeing 747s operated by Pan American and KLM at the airport on Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands.

2. March, 1974: 346 killed in the worst single-plane accident when a Turkish DC-10 crashed 26 miles northeast of Paris.

3. June 23, 1985: 329 killed when an Air India Boeing 747 crashed off the coast of Ireland, apparently because of an explosion.

4. Aug. 19, 1980: 301 killed in a fiery emergency landing of a Saudi Arabian L-1011 at the airport in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

5. May 25, 1979: 273 killed when an American Airlines DC-10 crashed on takeoff in Chicago.

6. Sept. 1, 1983: 269 killed when a Korean Air Lines 747 was shot down by a Soviet fighter after flying through Soviet airspace near Sakhalin Island.

7. November, 1979: 257 killed when an Air New Zealand DC-10 taking tourists to the South Pole struck a mountain in Antarctica.

8. Jan. 1, 1978: 213 killed when an Air India 747 en route to the Middle East kingdom of Dubai crashed less than two minutes after taking off from Bombay.

9. December, 1974: 191 killed when a chartered Dutch DC-8 returning Indonesian Moslems from Saudi Arabia went down in Sri Lanka.

10. August, 1975: 188 killed when a chartered Moroccan Boeing 707 crashed near Agadir, Morocco.

11. November, 1978: 183 killed when a chartered Icelandic Airlines DC-8 crashed short of an airport in Colombo, Sri Lanka. On Nov. 27, 1983, 183 persons were killed when an Avianca Boeing 747 crashed near Madrid’s Barajas airport.

13. December, 1981: 180 killed when a chartered Yugoslavian Inex-Adria Airways DC-9 slammed into a fog-shrouded mountain near Ajaccio, Corsica.

Three separate crashes each killed 176 persons: A Soviet Aeroflot crash near Moscow in October, 1972; the collision of a British Airways Trident and a Yugoslav DC-9 near Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in September, 1976; and the crash of a Jordanian Boeing 707 at Nigeria’s Kano airport in January, 1973.