What Caused The Crash Of Lot Flight 5055?

I still think about how quickly a routine flight can turn into a disaster. On 9 May 1987, LOT Flight 5055, an Il-62M, suffered a catastrophic engine failure that led to an intense in-flight fire. The root cause was a ruptured turbine disc: metal fatigue and improper treatment made the disc crack and explode, and the flying fragments damaged fuel and hydraulic lines and critical control and electrical systems.

Once the fire started, it wasn’t just an engine problem — the damage propagated through the airplane’s systems, leaving the crew with almost no workable controls. Investigators concluded that the maintenance and material issues allowed a single failure to escalate into something fatal. I’ve flipped through photos and read survivor-less reports, and it’s sobering how maintenance lapses and a single mechanical defect can have such a terrible outcome. It changed how inspectors and airlines looked at critical rotating parts afterward, which is some small comfort amid the tragedy.

That crash has always felt like one of the darker, strangely cinematic tragedies in aviation — the kind of real-life disaster that reads almost like a twist in a noir novel. On 9 May 1987, LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055, an Ilyushin Il-62M, suffered a catastrophic in-flight failure that quickly escalated into an uncontrollable fire and a total loss of the aircraft. The immediate technical cause was an uncontained failure of a turbine disc in one of the engines: the disc fractured, shredded, and sent high-energy fragments outward into surrounding systems.

Those fragments did far more than ruin the engine. They punctured fuel and hydraulic lines and damaged electrical systems and control runs, sparking a severe fire and knocking out vital systems. Investigators found that the disc had developed fatigue cracking — a long-term material problem exacerbated by inadequate heat treatment and maintenance practices. In lay terms, a critical rotating part was weakened, it broke apart under stress, and then the debris basically punched holes in the airplane’s ability to keep flying or be controlled. The crew fought to manage alarms, fires, and failing systems, but the damage cascaded so fast that the aircraft became unrecoverable.

I’ve read parts of the official reports and watched reconstructions on documentaries like 'Mayday', and what always hits me is how mechanical failure, human maintenance errors, and design vulnerability can chain into catastrophe. The investigative work pointed to both the fractured component itself and shortcomings in how such parts were handled and inspected. The crash killed everyone on board, and afterwards there were hard lessons about metallurgy, inspection regimes, and how to design systems to tolerate a single point of failure. For anyone who likes technical deep-dives, the case is grimly instructive: it’s a reminder that aviation safety is stitched together from thousands of tiny decisions — and when several of them go wrong, the result can be devastating.