LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 was an Ilyushin Il-62M of LOT Polish Airlines that crashed in the late morning hours of Saturday, May 9, 1987. The event happened in the Kabaty Woods nature reserve on the outskirts of Warsaw, Poland. The flight prepared to leave from Warsaw to New York City's John F. Kennedy International airport when it encountered multiple catastrophic events with the numbers 1 and 2 engines as well as the elevator shortly after departure. All 183 passengers and crew on board perished in the crash. The accident was the deadliest of any
LOT Polish Airlines Flight 5055 involving an Ilyushin Il-62, and to date, it remains the deadliest aviation crash in Polish history. It was determined to have been caused by the disintegration of an engine shaft due to faulty bearings. The aircraft was a 186-seat Ilyushin Il-62M built in the third quarter of 1983, registered SP-LBG and named "Tadeusz Kościuszko", after the Polish military leader and national hero. All of the crew members were Polish. The captain, Zygmunt Pawlaczyk, was 59 years old, with 19,745 flight hours' experience (5,542 on Ilyushin Il-62s), and a captain of the type from 11 May 1978. The first officer, Leopold