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 the Vickers Vanguard. The Vanguard drew extensively from the knowledge and design of the Viscount, and likewise maintained its advantage of lower operating costs over pure jet-powered aircraft, but its disadvantage in being slower than jet aircraft became increasingly critical as jets became more available over time. Regular passenger flights were launched by BEA in 18 April 1953, the world's first scheduled turboprop airline service. BEA became a large user of the Viscount, as well the rival Handley Page Dart Herald; by mid-1958 BEA's Viscount fleet had carried over 2.75 million passengers over 200,000 flight hours. Following BEA's launch of