Vitaly Kaloyev was waiting for his family at Barcelona airport on the night of July 1, 2002.
Svetlana and their children Konstantin, 10, and Diana, 4, were traveling on Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937. At 23:35, more than 10.000 meters above Überlingen, Germany, their plane collided with a DHL cargo Boeing. All 71 people aboard both aircraft died, 52 of them children who were going on vacation. It was the result of a chain of failures. A radar out of service for maintenance, an air traffic controller monitoring two screens at once, and two conflicting instructions that led both pilots to descend to the same altitude.
Kaloyev arrived in Germany hoping to find them alive. He recognized his wife among the wheat; his children, almost unrecognizable, beside a road. A year later, the airline offered him 60.000 Swiss francs for each person killed. He hired a detective, tracked down the air traffic controller Peter Nielsen, and on February 24, 2004, rang the doorbell of his home in Kloten, Switzerland. He showed him a photo of his family. Nielsen did not apologize. Kaloyev took out a knife.
He served 4 years of a 9-year sentence. In 2016, North Ossetia awarded him its highest state honor.
