Air Disasters that Shook Entire Football World

BENGALURU: On 28th November, LaMia Flight 2933 carrying 77 passengers along with the players of the Brazilian Chapecoense football club crashed while on its way to Colombia. Chapecoense team was going there to attend the final of the Copa Sudamericana Cup. Seventy-one people died in the crash, including 19 members of Chapecoense club, while in six survivors, there are football players. This is not the first incident; there have been fatalities in the past also. Given below is a list of few such accidents, as compiled by The Economic Times which left a lasting impact on the footballing world.

On 4 May 1949, a Fiat plane carrying members of Italian football club Torino slammed into a hill of Turin, Italy. Thirty-one people died in the crash, including eighteen players and five officials. There was no survivor of this accident and the entire team was killed in the disaster known as a ‘Superga’ air disaster. A book was later published on this crash titled as “The Day Italian Football Died.”

A similar accident happened at Manchester United football club on 6th February 1958. A British European Airways flight carrying players of the football team of Manchester United crashed at Munich airport while making the third attempt to take off. There were 44 passengers on board, of which 20 died on-the-spot while three died in the hospital. A plane carrying eight members of the Danish football team crashed on 16 July 1960. The players were on their way for the final selection match for the 1960 Olympics. The plane crashed due to the bad weather and pilot was the only one who survived the crash, which resulted in the death of all players on-board.

A Southern Airways DC-9 plane carrying 75 members, including 37 Marshall University Thundering Herd football team members crashed on 14 November 1970 by hitting to a pine tree line. The plane was heading for the Tri-State Airport, Ceredo, West Virginia. All members on board were killed in the accident and it is recorded as the worst disaster in the US sports history. It was the theme of the 2006 movie “We Are Marshall.”

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