Firozabad rail disaster happened at 02:55 when a passenger train named Kalindi Express from Kanpur Railway station collided with Purushottam Express from Puri. At first the Kalindi Express from Kanpur Railway station struck a cow but was unable to proceed further as its brakes were damaged.Next the Purushottam Express from Puri struck the Kalindi Express behind with a speed of 70 kmph.
The last three carriages of the Kalindi Express and two carriages along with the engine of Purushottam Express got destroyed. About 358 passengers were reported dead in this deadly rail disaster.
Gordon Welchman
William Gordon Welchman (15 June 1906, Bristol – 8 October 1985, Newburyport, Massachusetts) was a Second World War codebreaker at Bletchley Park. He was a British mathematician, university professor, and author.
After the war he moved to the US, and later took American citizenship.
Welchman was one of four early recruits to Bletchley park (the others being Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry). They were also the four signatories to the letter to Winston Churchill in October 1941, asking for more resources for the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park. Churchill responded with one of his 'Action This Day' written comments.
Welchman's main work at Bletchley was "traffic analysis" of encrypted German communications. This is, first, looking for an increase in signals. Major events in warfare are signalled in advance by a huge increase in messages. Second, there are standardized parts of a message, such as message origination, message destination, time/date information, and so on. These are much easier to decipher than the actual message content. Welchman developed this approach. Today we describe this as "metadata" analysis.
Welchman helped improve Alan Turing's design of the Polish electromechanical Enigma-cipher-breaking machine, the bombe. Welchman's 'diagonal board', made the device much more efficient in the attack on the ciphers of the German Enigma machine. Bombes became the main mechanical aid in breaking Enigma ciphers during the war. They speeded up the search for current wheel order settings being used with the Enigma machines. The settings were changed often, initially at least once per day.
Welchman was initially head of Hut Six, the section at Bletchley Park responsible for breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma ciphers. During his time at Bletchley, Welchman opposed engineer Tommy Flowers' efforts on the Colossus computer (the world's first programmable electronic computer) because Colossus used vacuum tubes.
In 1943, he became Assistant Director in charge of mechanisation and also had responsibility for cryptographic liaison with the US.
Welchman moved to the United States in 1948 where he taught the first computer course at MIT in the United States. He followed this by employment with Remington Rand and Ferranti. Welchman became a naturalised American citizen in 1962. In that year, he joined the MITRE Corporation, working on secure communications systems for the US military. He retired in 1971 but was retained as a consultant.
In 1982 his book "The Hut Six Story" was published, initially by McGraw-Hill in the US and by Allen Lane in Britain. The British Secret Service objected, and so did the National Security Agency. The book was not banned but Welchman lost his security clearance (and therefore his consultancy with MITRE). He was forbidden to discuss with the media either the book or his wartime work.
Welchman died in 1985; his final conclusions and corrections to the story of wartime code breaking were published posthumously in 1986 in the paper 'From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: the birth of Ultra' in "Intelligence & National Security", Vol 1, No l. The entire paper was included in the revised edition of "The Hut Six Story" published in 1997 by M & M Baldwin.
Accession
Accession is the attainment or acquisition of a position of rank or power, typically that of monarch or president. Eg."the queen's accession to the throne".
Accession day is a celebration. It is usually the anniversary of when a monarch takes office. The earliest record of accession celebrations are from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England.
Accession is not the same as coronation or inauguration. Coronation and inauguration are both ceremonies which take place after the accession.
Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision
Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision occurred on 12 November 1996 over the village of Charkhi Dadri in Haryana, India. The collision happened between Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747-100B from Delhi to Dhahran(Saudi Arabia) and Kazakhstan Airlines Illyushin II-76 from Chimkent, Kazakhstan to Delhi.
SVA763 (Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747-100B) departed from Delhi International Airport to Dhahran at 18:35. KZA1907 (Kazakhstan Airlines Illyushin II-76) was descending to Delhi airport at the same time.Both flights were controlled by VK Dutta.KZA1907 was cleared to descend 15,000 feet altitude, whereas SVA763 was cleared to climb to 14,000feet. After 8 min, KZA1907 reported that they reached 15000 ft altitude, but they were descending to 14,500 ft at that time and were continuing the descent.
Not noticing it, soon the KZA1907's tail cut through SVA763's left wing. The Boieng of SVA763 lost control and went into a descending spiral and hit the ground at 1135 kmph. The Ilyushin remained structurally intact as it went in a steady but rapid and uncontrolled descent until it crashed in a field.In the end, all 312 people on board SVA763 and all 37 people on KZA1907 were killed.
The collision took place about west of Delhi. The wreckage of the Saudi aircraft crashed near Dhani village, Bhiwani District, Haryana. The wreckage of the Kazakh aircraft hit the ground near Birohar village, Rohtak District, Haryana.
The crash was investigated by the Lahoti Commission, headed by then-Delhi High Court judge Ramesh Chandra Lahoti. The flight data recorders were decoded by Kazakhstan Airlines and Saudi Airlines under the supervision of air crash investigators in Moscow and Farnborough, England, respectively.
The commission determined that the accident had been the fault of the Kazakh Il-76 commander, who had descended from the assigned altitude of and subsequently and even lower. The report says that the cause of this serious problem in operating procedure was due to the lack of English language skills on the part of the Kazakh aircraft pilots; they were dependent entirely on their radio operator for communications with the ATC.
Just a few seconds from impact, the Kazakh plane climbed slightly and the two planes collided. This was because the radio operator of Kazakhstan 1907 discovered only then that they were not at 15,000 feet and asked the pilot to climb.The tail of the Kazakh plane clipped the left wing of the Saudi jet, severing both parts from their respective planes.
The disaster was again the subject of an episode in the documentary series "Mayday (TV series)" on 2 March 2009 entitled "Sight Unseen", in a wide-screen format with sophisticated computer animations on National Geographic Channel.
Church of the Company Fire
Church of the Company Fire is the largest fire accident ever by death toll in the world. It occurred on 1863 December 8 in Santiago, Chile. About 2000 to 3000 people are said to have been killed in the fire accident.
Church of the Company of Jesus was a Jesuit church located in Santiago, Chile.The day of the fire was the celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The fire started at 7 P.M. when an oil lamp had ignited the place and it got fire. About 2000-3000 people inside the church got roasted in the massive fire accident.