Plane Crash in Perm: “Like a Meteorite”
// Aeroflot Boeing crashes on landing
An Aeroflot Nord Boeing 737-500 crashed while landing at Bolshoe Savino Airport in Perm yesterday. All 88 people on board were killed. Among them was Gennady Troshev, former commander of the North Caucasus Military District and presidential advisor on Cossack affairs. Investigators say a fire in one of the engines is the most likely cause of the crash.
The flight left Sheremetyevo 1 Airport in Moscow at 1:12 a.m. and was attempting a landing at 3:30, Moscow time, in difficult weather conditions. There was rain and cloud cover at the level of 240 m. The first landing approach was unsuccessful, and the second ended in catastrophe. The plane came down 5-6 km. away from the runways on a railroad line in the Industrial neighborhood of Perm.
“At 5:10 [local time], I was awakened by a powerful roar,” a resident of Tbilisi St. in Perm recounted. “I saw a ball of fire out the window falling to Earth. I immediately got dressed and ran to the spot. It took about ten minutes to get there. The police and firemen hadn’t arrived yet. I saw twisted rails, uprooted posts and small bit of burning wreckage scattered around. There were seats with burned bodies strapped into them in the burning wreckage.” Another eyewitness said that the flames reached almost to the fifth floor of nearby buildings at impact.
Passengers waiting for the 6:10 Perm-Moscow flight on the same plane (flight SU 822) were first informed that the flight was delayed, and then that it was cancelled. The Aeroflot website indicated that the Moscow flight has arrived in Perm. Railroad repair workers circled the area nervously talking into mobile telephones. “I need 100 people here in an hour and a half,” one was heard to say. “No, I don’t know where to get them!” One of the workers told Kommersant that the plane circled the Krokhalevka neighborhood and began to break up in the air, hitting the ground at a 35-40 – degree angle.
Police kept relatives of those on the flight way from the site of the crash and set up headquarters in a nearby cultural center. There, a list of 81 passengers and 6 crew members was first released. Later, Troshev’s name was added to the list. He was traveling with Vladimir Pogodin, vice president of the Sambo Federation of Russia. They were on their way to take part in a tournament on September 13-14, according to Russian Sambo Federation board member Renat Laishev. Laishev was initially scheduled to travel with them, but was laid up after a car accident. Sambo is a form of hand-to-hand combat.
Among the other passengers were noted Perm lawyer Elizaveta Noskova, owner of the Perm Mai group of companies Oleg Yashmanov and the daughter, son-in-law and grandson of Perm Territory Human Rights Ombudsman Tatyana Margolina. Seventeen foreign citizens were also on board, some of them from Azerbaijan. One distraught young man at the cultural center said his friends were returning from their honeymoon on the flight.
City chief Arkady Katz held several meetings with relatives of crash victims. Aeroflot offered flights to victims’ relatives from Moscow and promised to pay 2 million rubles to the families of the dead. Oleg Popov, head of the Emergencies Ministry main department for Perm, said that victims’ remains could only be identified by DNA and suggested that relatives give blood samples.
The plane crashed in a depression separating the neighborhoods of Krokhalevka and Eranichi, missing some apartment buildings only by 300-500 m. The Emergencies Ministry suggested that the pilots took evasive measures to avoid the housing as the plane was falling. It has been suggested that a fire started in one of the engines during the second landing approach. The plane’s flight recorders have been recovered. There were no victims on the ground. The Trans-Siberian rail line was blocked after 500 m. of it was damaged. Movement on the rail line was restored yesterday evening.
Investigators say there are witnesses who saw the fire in the engine before the crash. Both technical causes and pilot error are being investigated as causes of the crash. Bolshoe Savino flight controller Irek Bikbov told Channel One television that the plane’s pilot did exactly the opposite of his instructions from airport flight controllers, rising before the second landing attempt instead of descending. “The crew received the directions, but did not follow them. Then I set a course for them with a right turn and they went left and asked, ‘Can’t we come in from this direction?’ as if they were in a hurry to go somewhere,” Bikbov recounted. “I asked, ‘Is everything alright there?’ and they confirmed that it was, then I told them, ‘No, make a second approach.” The flight was handed over to among flight controller when it was seen that the plane was losing altitude, but the crew did not respond to him. The last words from the crew were “Guys, we’re f***ed.”
Transportation Minister Igor Levitin stated yesterday evening that the plane was in good working order at the time the flight took off and that there is no indication of terrorist activity. Law enforcement sources confirm that tests failed to disclose the presence of explosives. The distribution of wreckage indicates that the plane began to break up in the air, however. Pilots note that the malfunction of a single engine on a Boeing 737-500 will not cause it to crash – the plane is able to remain in the air and to land under those conditions. Captain of the flight Rodion Medvedev was highly experienced, with 3689 flight hours, of which 1165 were in the Boeing 737-500. He underwent training at the Flight Training Institute in Denver, Colorado, in 2006.
Aeroflot has announced that it will no longer work with its subsidiary Aeroflot Nord after September 15. Aeroflot owns 51 percent of the company. “Aeroflot general director Valery Okulov stated that “We have already paid too dearly with our reputation for sharing our name with the other airline,” which will operate without the identification with Aeroflot in the future. Now another Aeroflot subsidiary, Aeroflot Don” will be subjected to minute safety examination.
Observers call Okulov’s statements an emotional reaction. They note that the damage to the airlines reputation has already been done and that it may lack a sufficient fleet to maintain all of its regional flights on its own.
Artem Voronenko, Maxim Strugov, Vyacheslav Sukhanov, Nadezhda Emelyanova, Olga Sedurina, Perm; Oleg Rudnikovich, Petr Mironenko
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 15, 2008
|
