Kvitbjørn disaster [SEP] point in time
Kvitbjørn disaster
The "Kvitbjørn" disaster occurred on 28 August 1947 when, in heavy fog, the Norwegian Air Lines Short Sandringham flying boat "Kvitbjørn", registered LN-IAV, hit a mountain close to Lødingsfjellet in Lødingen, southern Tjeldsundet, Norway.
The flying boat crashed en route from Harstad to Bodø, the two stopovers between its origin Tromsø and destination Oslo. All thirty-five people on board (twenty-eight passengers and a crew of seven) perished, making the crash the deadliest in Norwegian
the 35 deaths in the 1947 Kvitbjørn disaster. Public sympathy ran high, and the secretary of the Norwegian Labor Party, Håkon Lie started a fundraiser to build a Norwegian village in Israel. The funds were used in helping build the moshav Yanuv.
Yitzhak Allal, the sole survivor, became world-famous, as his story was published in newspapers throughout Europe and the United States. Hundreds of letters and telegrams arrived in his hospital room from around the world. The King of Norway sent him a bicycle as a present