Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims’ Crusader, Dies at 91
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Hans Ephraimson-Abt in New York in 1997.
Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Hans Ephraimson-Abt in New York in 1997.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: October 26, 2013
Hans Ephraimson-Abt, who became an internationally known advocate for families of air-crash victims after the death of his daughter on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighter planes in 1983, died on Oct. 18 in Short Hills, N.J. He was 91.
The cause was heart failure, his son, Hans, said.
A commercial 747 bound from New York to Seoul, South Korea, KAL 007 was shot down near Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia, on Sept. 1, 1983, after straying accidentally into Soviet air space. All 269 people aboard were killed.
The Soviet Union long maintained that the flight was a spy plane sent by the United States, and the attack endures in public memory as one of the last, bitterest engagements of the cold war.
Afterward, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was in the vanguard of establishing a unified movement to aid air-crash victims’ families. In work that occupied him to the end of his life, he traveled the world, testifying, lobbying and meeting with government officials, airline executives and bereaved families.
“Hans fought for people who didn’t have a voice and didn’t know that they needed a voice,” Deborah A. P. Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a telephone interview. “He turned his own tragedy into advocating for all air travelers, to make sure that their families were taken care of and treated with respect after an accident.”
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who was fluent in a string of European languages, assisted not only the families of KAL 007 passengers, but also those of victims of many later crashes, including Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he advised relatives of passengers aboard the hijacked planes, in particular the families of passengers from Germany, where he was born and brought up.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was the longtime chairman of what was known early on as the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims; reflecting its expanded purview, the association more recently became the Air Crash Victims Families Group, of which he was the spokesman.
In 1983, when KAL 007 families chose to band together after the crash, there were few avenues for obtaining support. Responding to air crashes — from notifying relatives and keeping them abreast of recovery efforts to providing emotional assistance — was then the duty of the airlines, a state of affairs that in the view of Mr. Ephraimson-Abt and his colleagues needed to be remedied.
In the 30 years since, as a result of their work, significant advances on behalf of victims’ families have been made.
In 1996, Congress passed the Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act, which empowered the National Transportation Safety Board to notify the families and the Red Cross to help care for them.
The next year, a new international aviation agreement raised the amount for which an air carrier was liable when an international flight crashed. The previous limit, set in 1966, capped carriers’ liability at $75,000 per passenger, except in rare cases where families could prove the airline guilty of willful misconduct.
The 1997 agreement, which Mr. Ephraimson-Abt helped broker, raised the cap to $139,000. For families seeking greater damages, the new agreement also relieved them of the burden of proving willful misconduct.
Near midnight on Aug. 30, 1983, a 23-year-old Alice Ephraimson-Abt boarded KAL Flight 007 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A recent graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she had majored in East Asian studies, she was headed, via Seoul and then Hong Kong, to Beijing. In China, she planned to teach English and study Mandarin.
After a refueling stop in Alaska on Aug. 31, Flight 007 took off for Seoul. By the time it was spotted by the Soviets on Sept. 1, it had deviated hundreds of miles off course.
After the plane was shot down, many victims’ families were not notified directly. Mr. Ephraimson-Abt heard about the crash from a hotel manager in Hong Kong, whom he had enlisted to look after his daughter on her arrival there.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt immediately phoned Korean Air Lines. The airline, he said afterward, hung up on him.
“To this day,” he said in 1996, testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, “Korean Air Lines has not informed me of the death of my daughter.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt’s son said that to his knowledge, the airline had still not communicated with the family.
The cause was heart failure, his son, Hans, said.
A commercial 747 bound from New York to Seoul, South Korea, KAL 007 was shot down near Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia, on Sept. 1, 1983, after straying accidentally into Soviet air space. All 269 people aboard were killed.
The Soviet Union long maintained that the flight was a spy plane sent by the United States, and the attack endures in public memory as one of the last, bitterest engagements of the cold war.
Afterward, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was in the vanguard of establishing a unified movement to aid air-crash victims’ families. In work that occupied him to the end of his life, he traveled the world, testifying, lobbying and meeting with government officials, airline executives and bereaved families.
“Hans fought for people who didn’t have a voice and didn’t know that they needed a voice,” Deborah A. P. Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a telephone interview. “He turned his own tragedy into advocating for all air travelers, to make sure that their families were taken care of and treated with respect after an accident.”
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who was fluent in a string of European languages, assisted not only the families of KAL 007 passengers, but also those of victims of many later crashes, including Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he advised relatives of passengers aboard the hijacked planes, in particular the families of passengers from Germany, where he was born and brought up.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was the longtime chairman of what was known early on as the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims; reflecting its expanded purview, the association more recently became the Air Crash Victims Families Group, of which he was the spokesman.
In 1983, when KAL 007 families chose to band together after the crash, there were few avenues for obtaining support. Responding to air crashes — from notifying relatives and keeping them abreast of recovery efforts to providing emotional assistance — was then the duty of the airlines, a state of affairs that in the view of Mr. Ephraimson-Abt and his colleagues needed to be remedied.
In the 30 years since, as a result of their work, significant advances on behalf of victims’ families have been made.
In 1996, Congress passed the Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act, which empowered the National Transportation Safety Board to notify the families and the Red Cross to help care for them.
The next year, a new international aviation agreement raised the amount for which an air carrier was liable when an international flight crashed. The previous limit, set in 1966, capped carriers’ liability at $75,000 per passenger, except in rare cases where families could prove the airline guilty of willful misconduct.
The 1997 agreement, which Mr. Ephraimson-Abt helped broker, raised the cap to $139,000. For families seeking greater damages, the new agreement also relieved them of the burden of proving willful misconduct.
Near midnight on Aug. 30, 1983, a 23-year-old Alice Ephraimson-Abt boarded KAL Flight 007 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A recent graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she had majored in East Asian studies, she was headed, via Seoul and then Hong Kong, to Beijing. In China, she planned to teach English and study Mandarin.
After a refueling stop in Alaska on Aug. 31, Flight 007 took off for Seoul. By the time it was spotted by the Soviets on Sept. 1, it had deviated hundreds of miles off course.
After the plane was shot down, many victims’ families were not notified directly. Mr. Ephraimson-Abt heard about the crash from a hotel manager in Hong Kong, whom he had enlisted to look after his daughter on her arrival there.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt immediately phoned Korean Air Lines. The airline, he said afterward, hung up on him.
“To this day,” he said in 1996, testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, “Korean Air Lines has not informed me of the death of my daughter.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt’s son said that to his knowledge, the airline had still not communicated with the family.
Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims’ Crusader, Dies at 91
Published: October 26, 2013
In an e-mail on Friday, a spokeswoman for the airline, now known as Korean Air, wrote, “Unfortunately, people who were at the airline in 1983-84 have retired, and no one in the present administration has any recollection of events then.”
Hans Eduard Ephraimson-Abt was born in Berlin on March 7, 1922, to a Jewish family. When World War II broke out, he was studying hotel management in Switzerland; he remained there, in a series of refugee camps, until the end of the war. After moving to the United States in 1950, he was reunited with his parents, who had managed to evade the Nazis.
In New York, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt spent several years directing the press department of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany. He later worked as an international business consultant.
After his marriage to Christine Anger ended in divorce in the early 1970s, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt reared Alice and her two younger siblings in Saddle River, N.J.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Soviet documents became public for the first time. Among them was the transcript of Flight 007’s cockpit recorder, which had been retrieved by Soviet divers in October 1983. The Soviet Union had long denied the recorder’s existence.
In 1992, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt led a delegation of victims’ families to Moscow, where the Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, gave them the transcript.
The transcript, which captured KAL 007’s last moments, made it clear that the plane did not explode immediately after it was hit by two Soviet air-to-air missiles, as had been generally supposed. Instead, it remained aloft for some minutes before plunging into the sea.
“We have been struggling for years to know what happened to our loved ones,” Mr. Ephraimson-Abt told The New York Times after receiving the transcript. “Now we face the agonizing recognition that their death was neither painless nor instant.”
In 1997, a federal jury awarded Alice Ephraimson-Abt’s survivors $2.1 million in compensation for her death. Out-of-court settlements by families of other KAL 007 passengers had ranged from $75,000 to $10 million, The Associated Press reported that year.
For his work on behalf of crash victims’ families, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt received the Order of Merit from Germany last June.
Besides his son, Hans, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who lived most recently in Ridgewood, N.J., is survived by a daughter, Viviane Ephraimson-Abt, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was sometimes asked why he chose to become involved in air disasters beyond the one that took his daughter’s life. His response was simple.
“No one looked after our families,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “We decided it would be a good idea if we looked after families in other crashes.”
