Partnair Flight 394 was a chartered flight that crashed on 8 September 1989 off the coast of Denmark, north of Hirtshals. All fifty passengers and five crew members on board the aircraft died, making this the deadliest disaster in Danish aviation history. The crash was caused by improper maintenance and use of counterfeit aircraft parts. Aircraft and crew The accident aircraft, registered as LN-PAA, was a 36-year-old Convair CV-580 operated by the Norwegian charter airline Partnair. The plane had switched owners several times, had undergone various modifications, had had multiple previous registrations (N73128, EC-FDP, PK-GDS, HR-SAX, JA101C, N770PR, and C-GKFT), and had been rebuilt after a landing accident in 1978. The most significant modification was a change from piston to turboprop engines in 1960; this added more horsepower to the aircraft. The owner of the aircraft preceding its sale to Partnair was a Canadian company that specialized in servicing Convairs. LN-PAA was one of the aircraft most recently acquired by Partnair. At the time of the crash, two other Convair 580s were in the Partnair fleet. The flight crew consisted of Captain Knut Tveiten and First Officer Finn Petter Berg, both aged 59. Tveiten and Berg were close friends who had flown together for years. Both pilots were very experienced, with close to 17,000 successful flight hours each. Berg was also Partnair's flight operations manager. Background At the time of the accident, Partnair was in financial difficulty. The airline's debts were such that, on the day of the accident flight, Norwegian aviation authorities had notified Norwegian airports to not allow Partnair aircraft to depart because the airline had not paid several charges and fees. Flight Flight 394 was en route from Oslo Airport, Fornebu, Norway, to Hamburg Airport, West Germany. The passengers were employees of the shipping company Wilhelmsen Lines, who were flying to Hamburg for the launching ceremony of a new ship. Half of the employees of Wilhelmsen's head office were on board. Leif Terje Løddesøl, an executive of Wilhelmsen, said that the atmosphere in the company was "very, very good" prior to the accident flight and that some of the employees "maybe" had been to prior launching ceremonies, which he described as "quite exciting". A regular employee on the flight, one of the top-performing employees in Wilhelmsen, had been asked to give the speech during the ceremony. Løddesøl said that a "normal person" in the company was not