Flight 1862 was scheduled to depart at 5:30 PM, but the flight was delayed until 6:20 PM.

At 6:22 PM, Flight 1862 departed from runway 01L on a northerly heading. Once airborne, the plane turned to the right in order to follow the Pampus departure route, aided by the Pampus VOR/DME navigation station. Soon after the turn, at 6:27 pm, above the Gooimeer, a lake near Amsterdam, a sharp bang was heard while the aircraft was climbing through 6500 feet. Engine number three separated from the right wing of the aircraft, damaged the wing flaps, and struck engine number four, which then also separated from the wing. The two engines fell away from the plane. They attracted the attention of some pleasure boaters who had been startled by the loud noise. The boaters notified the Netherlands Coastguard of two objects they had seen falling from the sky. Captain Fuchs made a mayday call to air traffic control (ATC) and indicated that he wanted to return to Schiphol. At 6:28:45 PM, the captain reported: "El Al 1862, lost number three and number four engine, number three and number four engine.

ATC did not yet grasp the severity of the situation. In aviation, the word lost as Captain Fuchs used it generally means a loss of engine capacity. ATC therefore believed that two engines had merely stopped functioning, and did not know that they had broken off the wing. It is probable that the crew, too, did not know that the engines had fallen off the aircraft. The outboard engine on the wing of a 747 is visible from the cockpit only with some difficulty, and the inboard engine on the wing is not visible at all. Given the choices that the captain and crew made following the loss of engine power, the Dutch parliamentary inquiry commission that later studied the crash assumed that the crew did not know that both engines had broken away from the right wing.

At 6:35 pm local time, the Boeing 747, in nearly a ninety-degree bank with its right wing pointing at the ground, ploughed into two high-rise apartment complexes in the Bijlmermeer neighborhood, at the corner of a building where the Groeneveen complex met the Klein-Kruitberg complex. The building exploded into flames and partially collapsed inward, destroying dozens of apartments. The cockpit came to rest east of the flats, between the building and the viaduct of Amsterdam Metro Line 53. During the last moments of the flight, the arrival traffic controllers made several desperate attempts to contact the aircraft. At the time of the crash, two police officers were in the Bijlmermeer checking on a burglary report. They saw the aircraft plummet and immediately sounded an alarm. The first fire trucks and rescue services arrived within a few minutes of the crash. Nearby hospitals were advised to prepare for hundreds of casualties. The flats were partly inhabited by undocumented illegal immigrants, and the death toll would be difficult to estimate in the hours after the crash. In the days immediately following the disaster, the bodies of the victims and the remains of the plane were recovered from the crash site. The remains of the plane were transported to Schiphol for analysis. The parts were not used by investigators to reconstruct the aircraft.

In the event of excessive loads on the Boeing 747 engines or engine pylons, the fuse pins holding the engine nacelle to the wing are designed to fracture cleanly, allowing the engine to fall away from the aircraft without damaging the wing or wing fuel tank. Airliners are generally designed to remain airworthy in the event of an engine failure, so that the plane can be landed safely. Damage to a wing or wing fuel tank can have disastrous consequences. The Netherlands Aviation Safety Board found, however, that the fuse pins had not failed properly, but instead had suffered metal fatigue prior to overload failure. This sequence of step-by-step failures caused the engine and pylon to break free, knocking outboard engine 4 and its pylon off the wing as well and inflicting serious damage on the leading edge of the right wing, including the control surfaces (flaps) that Captain Fuchs later tried to extend in flight. Research indicated that the plane had only managed to maintain level flight at first due to its high air speed (280 knots). The damage to the right wing, resulting in reduced lift, had made it much more difficult to keep the plane level. At 280 knots (520 km/h), there was nevertheless sufficient lift on the right wing to keep the plane aloft. Once the plane had to reduce speed for landing, however, it was doomed; there was too little lift on the right wing to enable stable flight, and the plane banked sharply to the right without any chance of recovery.

Please click here to see what exactly happened The Safety Board pieced together a probable sequence of events for the loss of engine 3: 1. Gradual failure by fatigue and then overload failure of the inboard mid-spar fuse pin at the inboard thin-walled location. 2. Overload failure of the outer lug of the inboard mid-spar pylon fitting. 3. Overload failure of the outboard mid-spar fuse pin at the outboard thin-walled and fatigue-cracked location. 4. Overload failure of the outboard mid-spar fuse pin at the inboard thin-walled location.