On Wednesday, July 27, 1955, El Al Flight 402 was cruising at around 18,000 feet over the Balkans when two Bulgarian MiG-15 fighter jets rose to intercept it.
The Lockheed Constellation, carrying 51 passengers and seven crew from London to Tel Aviv, had strayed from its assigned airway and crossed into communist Bulgaria. The Bulgarian fighter jets opened fire, and the airliner began to descend, burning, as the crew apparently tried to reach safety near the Greek border.
The plane never reached the ground intact.
Struck a second time as it descended through 8,000 feet, the Constellation was attacked again near 2,000 feet. It broke apart in midair and fell in flames near the town of Petrich. There were no survivors.
For several hours, however, the full horror remained unknown. El Al’s first statement spoke of an SOS message, gunfire and a “forced landing” inside Bulgaria.
By the following morning, July 28, the truth had reached Israel. All 58 passengers and crew were dead.
That day, The Jerusalem Post carried the news across its front page beneath the headline: “Israel Lodges ‘Vehement Protest’ At Shooting Down of El Al Airliner.” Underneath, in still larger human terms, were the words: “All 58 Passengers, Crew Dead.”
Flight 402 had begun its scheduled journey in London the previous evening, stopping in Paris and Vienna. At 2:53 a.m., it departed Vienna for Lod Airport on the final leg of the journey. Its course was supposed to follow the Amber 10 airway over Yugoslavia and Greece, avoiding the tightly guarded territory of the Soviet-aligned People’s Republic of Bulgaria.
Somewhere over Yugoslavia, something went wrong. The aircraft left the airway and turned toward the Bulgarian frontier. An accident account later suggested that the crew may have misidentified the Skopje radio beacon after an incorrect radio-compass indication, possibly affected by storm activity. The reason for the deviation was never established beyond dispute.
What followed was less ambiguous. Bulgarian air defenses detected the airliner and sent two MiG-15s to meet it. Bulgaria later claimed that its pilots had fired warning shots and instructed the aircraft to land. According to the Bulgarian version, the Constellation appeared to comply before turning south toward Greece.
The order was then given to shoot it down.
Pini Ben-Porat: The pioneer in the cockpit
Among the men in the cockpit was First Officer Pinchas “Pini” Ben-Porat, one of the pioneers of Israeli aviation. Born Pinchas Anchipolovsky in Ukraine in 1914, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine as a child and became a pilot in the Palmach’s Palavir.
In December 1947, before the State of Israel came into existence, Ben-Porat flew a light aircraft to the besieged Nevatim settlement, removed one of its doors and carried out an improvised attack with a gunner and hand grenades – an early example of Israeli close-air support. He later flew during the War of Independence, commanded the Israel Air Force’s 69 Squadron and became the first Israeli instructor at the IAF flight academy before joining El Al in 1950.
The captain was Stanley Reginald Hinks, a veteran of the Royal Air Force’s Transport Command. A later British submission to the International Court of Justice described him as a reliable officer and an “above-average pilot with a high sense of duty.”
For El Al, then only six years old, the disaster was unprecedented. In its July 28 edition, the Post noted that it was “the first time in El Al’s history that one of its passenger planes had crashed.” Days later, the airline said it was proud of the “unblemished record of safety” maintained by its crews over millions of miles.
The first Bulgarian explanations only deepened the anger. Sofia initially said that anti-aircraft gunners had brought down the aircraft after it entered Bulgarian airspace without warning, while Israel demanded access to the crash site and sent an investigative mission led by El Al operations chief Yoel Palgi.
The three-man team was eventually allowed into Bulgaria, but only for six hours. In a story published on August 1, The Jerusalem Post reported that after returning to Athens, Palgi said the investigators had seen “charred debris of the Constellation scattered over a wide area of a hill,” but accused Bulgarian officials of removing material connected to the passengers.
“We were received most coldly by the Bulgarians, who during our six-hour stay offered us just one glass of water,” he said.
Israel brought the El Al case to the International Court of Justice
The mission concluded that the aircraft had been brought down by two fighters rather than ground fire. Bulgarian authorities revised their account days later, admitting that two MiG jets had attacked Flight 402 and that their pilots had been “too hasty.”
Sofia expressed regret, promised to punish those responsible and offered compensation, while continuing to blame the aircraft for penetrating deep into its territory.
In Israel, the language was far less restrained. On August 5, the Post published a press review under the title “The El Al Murder,” describing the shooting as a “brutal” act and warning against allowing Bulgarian explanations to obscure what had happened.
Five days earlier, on July 31, another archive page had appeared beneath the heading “Nation Mourns Air Victims,” capturing the scale of the shock in a country whose national airline had until then never suffered such a loss.
The dispute continued long after the wreckage had been cleared. Israel brought the case to the International Court of Justice, arguing that Bulgaria was responsible for the destruction of an innocent civilian aircraft.
In May 1959, the court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to decide the dispute; it made no judgment on the lawfulness of the attack itself. A compensation agreement was finally reached in 1963, with Bulgaria agreeing to pay $195,000 for the 22 Israeli victims, although the settlement did not cover the loss of the aircraft.
The dead were buried in a common grave at Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel Aviv. A year after the disaster, a new moshav in southern Israel was named Nir Hen: “hen,” the Hebrew letters het and nun, has the numerical value of 58.
Even some of the mail which was carried aboard Flight 402 survived the fire and impact. When it eventually reached Israel, it was marked with a simple Hebrew stamp: “This piece of mail survived in El-Al airplane that was shot down over Bulgaria on 27.7.55.”
Seventy-one years later, it remains one of the darkest surviving descriptions of what happened in the skies above Petrich.