Austrian Airlines Flight 901 Austrian Airlines Flight 901 Austrian Airlines Flight 901 was a flight from Vienna, Austria to Moscow, USSR (now Russia) via Warsaw, Poland. On the night of 26 September 1960 the aircraft operating the flight, a Vickers Viscount, crashed near Moscow while on its approach to land, killing 31 of the 37 passengers and crew on board. The aircraft was a Vickers Viscount 837 four-engined turboprop airliner registered "OE-LAF". The aircraft had first flown on 10 February 1960 and had been delivered new to Austrian Airlines about two weeks later, seven months before the crash. The aircraft departed Warsaw with six
Vickers Viscount TAA. Unstated was the requirement for both airlines to have identical equipment. The first North American airline to use turboprop aircraft was Trans-Canada Air Lines (TCA), with a small fleet of Type 700 Viscounts. Initially, TCA was cautious of the Viscount due to the turboprop engine being a new technology, and there had been a preference for acquiring the piston-engined Convair CV-240 instead; praise of the Viscount from pilots and a promise from Vickers to make any design changes desired by TCA persuaded it to procure the Viscount instead. On 6 December 1954, the first Viscount was delivered to Canada