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Lakshman Kadirgamar survived 1979 Swissair crash
View(s):Two Sri Lankans survived a plane crash more than four and a half decades ago, one of whom was former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, then a UN civil servant.
On October 7, 1979, Mr Kadirgamar, then Head of the Asia-Pacific division of the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), was travelling on Swissair flight 316 to Beijing with WIPO Director General Dr Arpad Bogsh and WIPO official Indrani Pike Wanigasekera when it overran the runway and crash-landed at the Athens airport, exploding into a ball of fire. Of the 154 passengers and crew on board, 14 were killed.
There were 100 doctors on board the flight on their way to a medical conference in China. The aircraft was carrying 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of radioactive isotopes and a small amount of plutonium as well as industrial diamonds bound for Bombay (Mumbai), the next scheduled stopover.
1979 October 7: Swissair flight 316 exploding into a ball of fire
Mr Kadirgamar, who was to become Sri Lanka’s foreign minister in 1994, had to jump off the rear door of the burning aircraft onto the tarmac below. It was nightfall at the time. A public school and university hurdler in his youth, he said later, “All the escape chutes had collapsed, and as I was the last to leave the aircraft, I had to jump out, sustaining thereby serious spinal injury, which kept me in hospital in Geneva for three months.”
Both Dr Bogsh and Ms Pike-Wanigasekera survived unhurt sliding down the chute onto the tarmac before it collapsed.
The pilot and co-pilot were found guilty by a Greek court of manslaughter with negligence and causing multiple bodily harm and sentenced to prison terms but later granted bail and thereafter paid fines in place of jail time. They never piloted again.
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