50 years have passed since a military DHC-6 Twin Otter aircraft from Bardufoss flew into the mountain top Litjetussen on Grytøya near Harstad. 17 people died.
Less than 20 minutes ago
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The pilot who flew what was one of the Air Force’s passenger planes in the mountains on 11 July 1972 was heavily intoxicated. The accident is one of the post-war period’s most controversial air tragedies in Norway and the worst accident in the Armed Forces in peacetime.
Until 2005, 33 years after the accident, the accident report was kept secret by the Armed Forces. The report showed that the pilot was drunk when the accident happened, and that he had had alcohol problems for a long time.
The plane should actually have flown directly from Bardufoss to Bodø. But the commander had made a private agreement to deliver an engine at Skagen airport at Stokmarknes.
–Relatives did not receive compensation
Those who lost loved ones did not know what had happened.
Among the 17 people who died in the accident, there were several children. Among the plane’s passengers were also several spouses of defense employees.
In 2009 and 2010, the district court and the court of appeal dealt with compensation claims against the state from the survivors of the passengers on the plane. The district court held that the case was obsolete.
The Court of Appeal did not think so. They went to great lengths to criticize the way the Armed Forces handled a pilot with alcohol problems, but did not believe that it could be characterized as gross negligence, and the state was acquitted.
The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal.
Sorry 40 years later
Only 40 years after the accident, in 2012, did the survivors receive an apology from the Ministry of Defense. It was the first time anyone at government level had apologized.
– I deeply regret to the bereaved and relatives that they never got to know the truth about the accident. I sympathize with those who lost their loved ones and have lived with the uncertainty afterwards, said Minister of Defense Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen (Labor) in an interview with NRK Brennpunkt.
The following year, in 2013, the mountain climbers who participated in the rescue operation after the accident were honored with the Defense Medal. Their efforts were not documented by either the police or the Armed Forces and were not given much attention until the climbers themselves wrote their own report on the demanding action.
The report states, among other things, that the climbers and forensic technicians from Kripos were denied helicopter assistance in order to be able to bring down the injured. The solution was therefore to divide the corpses into the mountainside and then carry them down in sacks.
One of Norway’s worst plane crashes
The Grytøya accident is one of the deadliest plane accidents in Norway in the last 50 years. The deadliest accident is the Operafjell accident on Svalbard in 1996, in which 141 people died when a Russian jet of the type Tupolev 154M crashed during approach.
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