Tuninter Flight 1153
aviation accident in Italy
Tuninter Flight 1153 was a scheduled international passenger flight flown by Tuninter Airlines from Bari International Airport in Italy, to Djerba-Zarzis Airport on the Tunisian island of Djerba. On 6 August 2005, the Tuninter ATR 72 ditched into the Mediterranean Sea about 18 miles (29 km) from the city of Palermo. Sixteen of the 39 people on board died. The accident resulted from fuel exhaustion due to the installation of fuel quantity indicators designed for the ATR 42 in the larger ATR 72. It was also Tuninter's first fatal accident in the 14-year history of the company.
History
The flight was under the command of 45-year-old Captain Chafik al-Gharbi (Arabic: شفيق الغربي), a skilled and experienced pilot with a total of 7,182 flight hours. The co-pilot, 28-year-old Ali Kebaier Lassoued (علي كبيّر لسود, also known as Ali Kebaier al-Aswad), had logged 2,431 flight hours. Both the captain and co-pilot were well-acquainted with the ATR 72, having accrued 5,582 hours and 2,130 hours in it, respectively.
The aircraft, an ATR 72–202, had its fuel quantity indicator (FQI) replaced the night before the flight, but technicians inadvertently installed an FQI designed for the ATR 42, a similar but smaller airplane with smaller fuel tanks. Ground crews and the flight engineer, relying on the incorrect readings from the newly installed FQI, loaded the aircraft with an inadequate amount of fuel for the flight.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q962475. Authority coordinates are 38.404, 13.458. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1153 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tuninter Flight 1153” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.