Crash site	Kisumu, Kenya
Airline	Imperial Airways
Aircraft	Armstrong Whitworth AW XV Atalanta Class – G-ABTI – Atalanta
Route	Juba – Kisumu – Nairobi – Broken Hill – Johannesburg
Crew	2 – 2 survivors
Passengers	9 – 9 survivors

 

The crash

The Imperial Airways southbound flight no. AS 287 was delayed two days in Athens due to bad weather over the Mediterranean. When the “Atalanta” took over the passengers and mail in Juba on the Nile the pilots planned to catch up on the time lost. On takeoff from Kisumu in the dark at 04:00 the plane hit some trees and was totally wrecked. Both pilots were injured, but none of the passengers were injured.
The cargo and the passengers were brought to Nairobi by the Imperial Airways airplane “City of Jodhpur” and an airplane from Wilson Airways.

 

The mail

The mail was not damaged. According to Sanford only three covers are known from this crash. One of these is the cover from Sweden shown below.

 

 

Examples of mail

Cover from Sweden with metermark dated STOCKHOLM 26 X 35 and addressed to a company in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika. On the back is a transit postmark from the railway line BERLIN-SASSNITZ 27.10.35 and an arrival postmark of DARESSALAM 5 NO 1935. Thiesen Collection.