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 the section below). IATA expanded the 2-letter-system with codes consisting of a letter and a digit (or vice versa) after ICAO had introduced its current 3-letter-system in 1982. Until then only combinations of letters were used. Airline designator codes follow the format xx(a), i.e., two alphanumeric characters (letters or digits) followed by an optional letter. Although the IATA standard provides for three-character airline designators, IATA has not used the optional third character in any assigned code. This is because some legacy computer systems, especially the "central reservations systems", have failed to comply with the standard, notwithstanding the fact that it