LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 "Good night! Goodbye! Bye, we're dying!"). All 172 passengers and 11 crew died as the aircraft broke apart and crashed. After the crash of the Il-62 operating as LOT Polish Airlines Flight 007, the airline had started replacing its Ilyushin Il-62s with the more modernized Ilyushin Il-62M version. These had newer engines (Soloviev D-30 instead of Kuznetsov NK-8), but both of these turbofan engines shared the same critical point — low pressure turbine and engine shaft design and construction. According to the Polish investigatory commission, the cause of the crash was the disintegration of an engine shaft due to faulty
Airline codes has been in place for 20 years. The codes issued to date comply with IATA Resolution 762, which provides for only two characters. These codes thus comply with the current airline designator standard, but use only a limited subset of its possible range. There are three types of designator: unique, numeric/alpha and controlled duplicate. IATA airline designators are used to identify an airline for commercial purposes in reservations, timetables, tickets, tariffs, air waybills and in telecommunications. A flight designator is the concatenation of the airline designator, xx(a), and the numeric flight number, n(n)(n)(n), plus an optional one-letter "operational suffix" (a).