Over the Black Sea, it became the 73rd airliner of this family lost as a result of aviation accidents. The total number of deaths in such incidents over 44 years reached 3,263 people. The Yuga.ru portal looked into the history of the aircraft’s operation and recalled the largest disasters involving it.
Tu-154 is a passenger aircraft developed in the 1960s in the USSR at the Tupolev design bureau. It was intended for the needs of medium-haul airlines and for a long time was the most popular Soviet jet passenger aircraft.
The first flight took place on October 3, 1968. The Tu-154 was mass-produced from 1970 to 1998. From 1998 to 2013, small-scale production of the Tu-154M modification was carried out at the Samara Aviakor plant. A total of 1,026 vehicles were produced. Until the end of the 2000s, it was one of the most common aircraft on medium-range routes in Russia.
The aircraft with tail number RA-85572, which crashed on December 25, 2016 over the Black Sea, was manufactured in 1983 and was a modification of the Tu-154B-2. This modification was produced from 1978 to 1986: an economy class cabin designed for 180 passengers, an improved automatic on-board control system. In 1983, RA-85572 was transferred to the USSR Air Force.
According to some Tu-154 pilots, the aircraft is too complex for a mass-produced passenger airliner and requires highly qualified flight and ground personnel.
At the end of the 20th century, the aircraft, designed in the 1960s, became obsolete, and airlines began to replace it with modern analogues - the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320.
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In 2002, EU countries, due to discrepancies in the level of permissible noise, banned flights of Tu-154s not equipped with special noise-absorbing panels. And since 2006, all Tu-154 flights (except for the Tu-154M modification) in the EU were completely banned. Aircraft of this type were operated mainly in the CIS countries at that time.
In the mid-2000s, the aircraft began to be gradually withdrawn from service. The main reason is the low fuel efficiency of the engines. Since the aircraft was designed in the 1960s, the developers did not face the issue of engine efficiency. The economic crisis of 2008 also contributed to accelerating the process of decommissioning the aircraft. In 2008, the entire Tu-154 fleet was withdrawn by S7, followed by Rossiya and Aeroflot the following year. In 2011, Ural Airlines stopped operating the Tu-154. In 2013, aircraft of this type were withdrawn from the air fleet by UTair, the largest Tu-154 operator at that time.
In October 2016, the last demonstration flight was made by the Belarusian airline Belavia. The only commercial operator of Tu-154 aircraft in Russia in 2016 was Alrosa Airlines, which has two Tu-154M aircraft in its fleet. According to unconfirmed reports, two Tu-154 aircraft, including the oldest model of this family, produced back in 1976, are owned by the North Korean airline Air Koryo.
In February 2013, serial production of the aircraft was discontinued. The last aircraft of the family, produced at the Samara Aviakor plant, was transferred to the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
The largest disasters of domestic Tu-154
02/19/1973, Prague, 66 dead
The Tu-154 aircraft was performing a regular passenger flight from Moscow to Prague when, while landing, it suddenly went into a rapid descent, not reaching 470 m from the runway, crashed into the ground and collapsed. 66 people out of 100 on board died. This is the first accident in the history of the Tu-154 aircraft. The Czechoslovak commission was unable to establish the causes of the incident, only suggesting that during the approach to land the airliner suddenly encountered a zone of turbulence, which led to a loss of stability. The Soviet commission came to the conclusion that the cause of the disaster was an error by the aircraft commander, who, during landing, accidentally, due to imperfections in the control system, changed the angle of the stabilizer.
07/08/1980, Alma-Ata, 166 dead, 9 wounded on the ground
The plane, flying on the route Almaty - Rostov-on-Don - Simferopol, crashed almost immediately after takeoff. The plane demolished two residential barracks and four residential buildings, injuring nine people on the ground. According to the official version, the disaster occurred due to a sudden atmospheric disturbance that caused a powerful downward air flow (up to 14 m/s) and a strong tailwind (up to 20 m/s) during takeoff, at the time of mechanization removal, at a high take-off weight, in conditions of a high-mountain airfield and high air temperatures. The combination of these factors at a low flight altitude and with a sudden lateral roll, the correction of which briefly distracted the crew, predetermined the fatal outcome of the flight.
11/16/1981, Norilsk, 99 dead
The airliner was completing a passenger flight from Krasnoyarsk and was landing when it lost altitude and landed on a field, not reaching about 500 m from the runway, after which it crashed into a radio beacon embankment and collapsed. 99 people out of 167 on board were killed. According to the commission's conclusion, the cause of the disaster was the loss of longitudinal control of the aircraft at the final stage of landing due to the design features of the aircraft. In addition, the crew realized too late that the situation was threatening an accident, and the decision to go around was made untimely.
12/23/1984, Krasnoyarsk, 110 dead
The airliner was supposed to carry out a passenger flight to Irkutsk when an engine failure occurred while climbing. The crew decided to return, but during landing a fire broke out, which destroyed the control systems. The car crashed to the ground 3 km before runway No. 29 and collapsed. The root cause of the disaster was the destruction of the first stage disk of one of the engines, which occurred due to the presence of fatigue cracks. The cracks were caused by a manufacturing defect.
07/10/1985, Uchkuduk, 200 dead
This disaster was the largest in terms of death toll in the history of Soviet aviation and Tu-154 aircraft. The airliner, performing a regular flight on the route Karshi - Ufa - Leningrad, 46 minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 11 thousand 600 m, lost speed, fell into a flat tailspin and crashed to the ground.
According to the official conclusion, this happened due to the influence of high non-standard outside air temperature, a small margin in the angle of attack and engine thrust. The crew made a number of deviations from the requirements, lost speed - and could not cope with piloting the aircraft. An unofficial version is widespread: before the flight, the crew’s rest schedule was disrupted, resulting in the pilots’ total waking time of almost 24 hours. And soon after the flight began, the crew fell asleep.
12/07/1995, Khabarovsk Territory, 98 dead
The Tu-154B-1 airliner of the Khabarovsk united air squad, flying on the route Khabarovsk - Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk - Khabarovsk - Ulan-Ude - Novosibirsk, crashed into Mount Bo-Dzhausa 274 km from Khabarovsk. The cause of the disaster was presumably asymmetrical pumping of fuel from the tanks. The ship's commander mistakenly increased the resulting right roll, and the flight became uncontrollable.
07/04/2001, Irkutsk, 145 dead
While landing at Irkutsk airport, the airliner suddenly fell into a flat tailspin and crashed to the ground. During the landing approach, the crew allowed the aircraft speed to drop below the permissible speed by 10-15 km/h. The autopilot, turned on in altitude maintenance mode, increased the pitch angle as the speed dropped, which led to an even greater loss of speed. Having discovered a dangerous situation, the crew added a mode to the engines, tilted the steering wheel to the left and away from themselves, which led to a rapid increase in vertical speed and an increase in roll to the left. Having lost spatial orientation, the pilot tried to bring the plane out of the roll, but his actions only increased it. The state commission blamed the cause of the disaster on the erroneous actions of the crew.
10/04/2001, Black Sea, 78 dead
The Siberia Airlines Tu-154M airliner was flying on the route Tel Aviv - Novosibirsk, but 1 hour 45 minutes after takeoff it crashed into the Black Sea. According to the conclusion of the Interstate Aviation Committee, the plane was unintentionally shot down by a Ukrainian S-200 anti-aircraft missile launched during Ukrainian military exercises held on the Crimean peninsula. Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexander Kuzmuk apologized for the incident. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma acknowledged Ukraine's responsibility for the incident and dismissed the Minister of Defense.
08/24/2004, Kamensk, 46 dead
The plane took off from Moscow and headed for Sochi. During a flight over the Rostov region, a strong explosion occurred in the tail section of the airliner. The plane lost control and began to fall. The crew tried with all their might to keep the plane in the air, but the uncontrollable airliner crashed to the ground near the village of Glubokoye, Kamensky district, Rostov region, and was completely destroyed. The explosion on the plane was carried out by a suicide bomber. Immediately after the terrorist attacks (on the same day, a Tu-134 plane flying from Moscow to Volgograd exploded), the terrorist organization Islambuli Brigades took responsibility for them. But later Shamil Basayev stated that he prepared the terrorist attacks.
According to Basayev, the terrorists he sent did not blow up the planes, but only hijacked them. Basayev claimed that the planes were shot down by Russian air defense missiles, as the Russian leadership feared that the planes would be sent to any targets in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
08/22/2006, Donetsk, 170 dead
The Russian airliner was carrying out a scheduled passenger flight from Anapa to St. Petersburg, but encountered a severe thunderstorm over the Donetsk region. The crew requested permission from the dispatcher for a higher flight level, but then the airliner lost altitude and three minutes later crashed near the village of Sukhaya Balka in the Konstantinovsky district of the Donetsk region.
“The lack of control over the flight speed and failure to comply with the instructions of the Flight Operations Manual (Flight Operations Manual) to prevent the aircraft from entering stall mode due to unsatisfactory interaction among the crew did not prevent the situation from becoming catastrophic.”, said the final conclusion of the Interstate Aviation Commission.
04/10/2010, Smolensk, 96 dead
The presidential airliner Tu-154M of the Polish Air Force was flying on the Warsaw-Smolensk route, but when landing at the Smolensk-Severny airfield in heavy fog, the airliner collided with trees, capsized, crashed to the ground and was completely destroyed. All 96 people on board were killed, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife Maria Kaczynski, as well as well-known Polish politicians, almost all the high military command and public and religious figures. They were heading to Russia on a private visit as a Polish delegation to the mourning events on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. An investigation by the Interstate Aviation Committee found that all systems of the aircraft were operating normally before the collision with the ground; due to fog, visibility at the airfield was below acceptable for landing, of which the crew was notified. The causes of the disaster were cited as the incorrect actions of the aircraft crew and psychological pressure on them.
Decoding the black boxes of the Tu-154 plane that crashed near Sochi showed that the cause of the accident was the error of the co-pilot and overload.
The reasons that led to it became known: the error of the co-pilot, who mixed up the control levers, as well as overload.
After a complete decoding of the black boxes of the Tu-154 that crashed in the Sochi waters at the end of December 2016 - parametric and speech - experts from the Ministry of Defense can actually accurately name the causes of the plane crash.
According to experts, the plane with passengers was destroyed by a combination of several factors: the board went on its last flight overloaded, and co-pilot Alexander Rovensky mixed up the landing gear and flap control levers during takeoff. When the crew noticed the mistake, it was already too late: the heavy Tu-154 simply did not have enough altitude for a rescue maneuver, so it hit the water with the rear fuselage and collapsed.
The human factor is recognized as the priority version of the Tu-154 crash.
“The data from speech and parametric (recording the operation of all aircraft components) recorders studied by experts from the Research Center for Operation and Repair of Aircraft of the Ministry of Defense in Lyubertsy say that in the third minute of the flight, when the airliner was at an altitude of 450 meters above sea level, the directional stability system sensors were triggered The plane began to sharply lose altitude due to problems with the flaps,” Life.ru quotes a source associated with the study of the causes of the disaster.
According to experts, this happened after the co-pilot, 33-year-old captain Alexander Rovensky, instead of retracting the landing gear, retracted the flaps.
“This caused the plane to go into an extreme angle of attack, the crew tried to turn the plane to reach the ground, but they didn’t have time to do this,” the source added.
As it turned out, the situation was aggravated by the overload of the Tu-154. Everything in the luggage compartment was filled to capacity. The tail section of the plane was pulled down. It was impossible to save the car: there was not enough speed and height. The tail section was the first to touch the water, and then the Tu-154 hit the sea with its right wing at high speed and collapsed.
The emergency situation came as a complete surprise to the crew: in the first seconds, the aircraft commander, 35-year-old Major Roman Volkov, and co-pilot Alexander Rovensky were confused, but quickly pulled themselves together and tried to save the plane until the last seconds.
From the phrases of the co-pilot and the commander of the ship, it becomes clear that something happened to the flaps, after which an alarm sounded due to the maximum angle of attack of the Tu-154.
Decoding the black box:
Speed 300... (Unintelligible.)
- (Inaudible.)
- I took the racks, commander.
- (Inaudible.)
- Wow, oh my!
(A sharp signal sounds.)
- Flaps, bitch, what the fuck!
- Altimeter!
- We... (Inaudible.)
(A signal sounds about a dangerous approach to the ground.)
- (Inaudible.)
- Commander, we are falling!
This is how the experts realized that the plane had problems with the flaps due to the fault of the crew.
The pilots who flew the Tu-154 confirm the conclusions of experts from the Ministry of Defense that the cause of the disaster could have been pilot error.
“In the Tupolev, the handles for retracting the landing gear and flaps are located on the canopy of the pilot’s cabin, between them, above the windshield. They can be confused, especially if the co-pilot sitting on the right, whose responsibilities include controlling the flaps and landing gear during takeoff, is tired. “The plane went into an extreme angle of attack, hit the water, and its tail fell off,” said Honored Pilot of the Russian Federation Viktor Sazhenin, who himself flew the Tu-154 for eight years.
This version is also considered acceptable by test pilot Hero of Russia Magomed Tolboev.
"On the control panel of the Tu-154, the flap and landing gear toggle switches are located above the windshield. The flaps are on the left, the landing gear is on the right. The co-pilot, who sits in the seat on the right, is responsible for them. It is possible that the pilot could have mixed up the levers or been distracted by something , so the plane took off with the landing gear extended and the flaps retracted,” Tolboev said.
According to Tolboev, one cannot exclude the possibility that after takeoff the crew exceeded the speed and the flap mechanism collapsed, causing the plane to fall to the right, lose speed and crash into the water.
Another factor in the Tu-154 disaster in Sochi could have been the lack of sufficient knowledge among the ship’s commander and co-pilot on how to act in an extreme situation.
“Most likely, neither the plane’s commander, Roman Volkov, nor the co-pilot, Alexander Rovensky, who graduated from military schools in the early 2000s, received special flight training,” says a source in the commission investigating the disaster in Sochi.
According to him, if the pilots had undergone special training for piloting in extreme situations at the Lipetsk Aviation Center for Retraining Military Pilots or at the Gromov Flight Research Institute, then perhaps the disaster could have been avoided.
“In the military schools that the pilots graduated from, they were hardly taught how to set the flaps to reverse when the flaps malfunction at low altitudes in order to bring the airliner out of the extreme angle of attack,” the expert explained.
In addition, engineers at the Research Center for Operation and Repair of Aircraft Equipment of the Ministry of Defense in Lyubertsy do not rule out that when the crew tried to turn the aircraft around in order to reach the ground, they had a good chance of salvation if it were not for the overload.
“The overload is evidenced by the fact that when the plane began to lose altitude, it was the tail section that hit the water first, which fell off, and then the plane’s right wing caught the water and crashed into the sea,” noted a source in the Russian Ministry of Transport.
According to him, it cannot be ruled out that the luggage compartment was simply overloaded.
“After all, this was almost the last flight of a civilian aircraft to Syria, and relatives and colleagues of the military personnel on a business trip could have asked the airfield management and the crew to take extra people on board. And during the flight and after landing in Sochi, the cargo could have been shaken. During takeoff from Sochi, the cargo moved to the rear of the airliner, and the plane was pulled down due to an emergency situation with the flaps,” says the expert.
The crash with the Tu-154 B-2 with tail number RA-85572 of the Ministry of Defense occurred on December 25, 2016. It was at 5:40 am Moscow time, 1.7 kilometers from the coast of Sochi. The Ministry of Defense plane was flying to Syrian Khmeimim from the Chkalovsky airfield, and in Sochi it was just refueling. There were 92 people on board the liner. A few minutes after lifting off from the runway, the plane disappeared from radar screens.
The crashed airliner was based at the Chkalovsky airfield near Moscow and was part of the Federal State Budgetary Institution State Airlines "223rd Flight Detachment" of the Ministry of Defense, which transports military personnel.
The Tu-154 B-2 modification is designed to carry 180 economy class passengers and was produced from 1978 to 1986. A total of 382 aircraft were built. Since 2012, Russian civil airlines have not operated the Tu-154 B-2.
The version of the explosion was voiced by the federal media, citing data from the European satellite Sentinel -1B, which was flying over the Black Sea at the time of the tragedy. It was he who recorded that the plane fell into the water after the explosion.
As the portal "News of the Day" reports, based on data transmitted by the European Sentinel-1B satellite, a Russian plane taking off from Adler was shot down as a result of sabotage.
According to this version, the Tu-154 crew, being six kilometers from the coast, planned to return to the runway. But in a matter of seconds, the fate of all passengers on the liner was doomed. First, the stabilizer was torn off by the roots, then the nacelle flew off from the landing gear, after which the flap hit the engine and broke the turbine.
Experts believe that it is highly likely that sabotage occurred using miniature external magnetic explosive devices attached to the aircraft at the airport. The explosion occurred on the outside of the hull and had a strictly directed effect. The crew and passengers were doomed.
It becomes clear why, immediately after the tragedy, a decision was made to “disband the air base in Chkalovsky,” from where the Tu-154 took off on its last flight.
The famous economist and political scientist Mikhail Delyagin commented on the new information: “This version finally describes in detail the course of the accident, and most importantly, it explains the huge distance - more than three kilometers! - a scattering of aircraft debris, cynically hushed up by official sources.
It remains to clarify the necessary details and find out the organizer of this sabotage, although the hysterical jubilation of a number of prominent liberals, I think, testifies to this with exhaustive convincingness.”
The fatal damage was caused by miniature external magnetic explosive devices attached from the outside. These sensors, installed on the ground, were triggered. Perhaps that is why the blast wave scattered fragments of the liner over a radius of more than three kilometers in the Black Sea.
According to the portal, this version has a place to be, because it was not without reason that literally immediately after the tragedy it was decided to disband the air base in Chkalovsky, from where the Tu-154 flew to Syria.
Let us remind you that on December 25, a Tu-154 crashed in the sky over Sochi. He was heading to Syria. 92 people died, including a native of the Ulyanovsk region, Alexander Serov.
Four residents of the Krasnoyarsk Territory died on that flight (according to other sources, five) - three dancers from the ensemble, one military man and a flight engineer.
I had problems posting an article called “Mysterious Mechanical Impact”; one of the sites with which I have recently been collaborating refused to publish it. In the end, on the morning of December 31, the article was published by the freest FREE PRESS in the Russian Federation. Thanks to them. The whole point is who you (me, you, he, she, they) serve: the people or the government.
I serve the people, so it was difficult for the site that serves the authorities to take material containing suspicions about the death of TU-154.
Here are some more wonderful thoughts on the death of the TU-154, from my friend, a military expert, I received them an hour ago:
“The collapse of the aircraft in the air is obvious when the remains of the aircraft are scattered over a radius of more than a kilometer from an altitude of less than 600 meters.
When an entire plane hits the water, the “spreading” of parts of the plane into more than three sizes of the plane, which is 120 meters, is impossible.
Remember, a bullet, for example, from an Austrian Glock-17 pistol flies under water no more than 5 meters, with an exit speed of about 350 meters per second (I have personal experience). The plane fell at a speed of no more than 150 meters per second... but parts of the plane are not a small bullet from a pistol! Therefore, the scattering of parts of an airplane under water of 120 meters is already “beyond the limit”, which means that parts of the airplane fell into the water after being separated in the air.
They separated from “external mechanical influence.” The aircraft usually has a 5-fold safety margin even for vibration. You have flown on airplanes and you know that airplanes easily pass through turbulence zones when carrying passengers, although the plane shakes a lot, and nothing happens.
Now imagine that the plane, at a speed of no more than 360 kilometers per hour (100 meters per second), fell apart. From the fall, parts of the plane could still increase the falling speed to 150 meters per second, but it is impossible to “swim” in the water and under water at a depth of 60 meters for another kilometer. This means that the plane broke up in the air due to “mechanical impact”...
I think that it will be almost impossible to “recognize” directly a certain mechanical external influence as an electronically provoked explosion due to the political consequences. The plane of the Ministry of Defense..., it means there was a trivial betrayal on the ground, a betrayal outright or through sloppiness..., I’m very sad to write about this, but it just doesn’t work out any other way - it’s just strength of materials (resistance of materials) for which I’ve always had " 5"...
But it seems the investigation will be blurred [...........]
I’m afraid that they won’t talk about electronic weapons either, they’ll blame it on some kind of flaps, pilot errors, a flock of birds (from which three engines flew apart, the birds were the size of a whale), bad aviation kerosene, a strong underwater current, and so on.
The plane will not fall apart within a kilometer radius for any of these reasons. By the way, please note that recently the Russian Federation has been very proud and advertised its electronic warfare (electronic warfare) systems, so they could have received an asymmetrical response.
Nowadays there are portable electronic warfare systems that suppress everything within a radius of several meters. Everything is phones, WI-FI, satellite navigation and even TV channel switching remotes. It weighs 150 grams.
Just imagine, from a NATO ship the power of an electronic warfare pulse is enough to simply burn all the electronics of the aircraft, possibly burn it from the inside, which will lead to an instantaneous unpredictable overload in the aircraft’s systems, and its possible disintegration.
You can also imagine it from a device weighing about 5 kilograms, which could have been “placed” on board before the flight.
I hope I'm wrong, but we'll see, they promised to give an analysis of the accident soon.
“Erroneous actions of the crew” are named as the cause of the Tu-154 crash over the Black Sea, which occurred on December 25, 2016. RIA Novosti, citing the Ministry of Defense, reported: “Based on the results of the investigation, it was established that the cause of the incident could have been a violation of the spatial orientation (situational awareness) of the aircraft commander, which led to his erroneous actions with the aircraft controls.”
Almost simultaneously with the RIA Novosti report, four pages of the report of the head of the Aviation Safety Service of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Lieutenant General Sergei Baynetov, on the results of the work of the “commission for investigating the aviation accident” were leaked onto the Internet. The document is very similar to the real one. It is dated May 4, 2017 and has the reference number 137/2/883 DSP (the abbreviation DSP means for official use).
The report of Lieutenant General Baynetov describes in great detail the last flight of the crashed Tu-154, which was part of the 800th special purpose airbase of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS). At the same time, the last minutes are second by second. Key takeaways from the document: “The cause of the crash of the Tu-154 B-2 aircraft was a violation of spatial orientation (situational awareness) of the aircraft commander, which led to his erroneous actions with the aircraft controls, as a result of which the aircraft, during the climb, went into descent and collided with the water surface.” .
The document emphasizes that the aircraft commander, Major Roman Volkov “began to experience difficulties in determining his location on the airfield, associated with his idea of the upcoming take-off course”, not understanding which of the two runways of the Sochi airport would take off from.
At 5 hours 24 minutes 36 seconds the crew began takeoff with a heading of 238°. But already in the seventh second of take-off, the aircraft commander (PIC) “emotionally began to ask the crew about the take-off course.” Moreover, with the use of “obscene language,” which led to “to the PIC’s failure to control take-off ground parameters, to the distraction of crew members from performing their functional duties”.
Having barely taken off from the ground, having given the plane a pitch of 15°, Major Volkov turned the steering wheel away from himself, slowing down the climb. And already at the 53rd second of the flight, when the plane had gained only 157 meters of altitude, the PIC ordered the flaps to be removed, although according to all regulations this operation is carried out at an altitude of at least 500 meters. At the same time, Volkov continued to tilt the steering wheel away from himself. Which led to the fact that at an altitude of 231 meters the plane switched to descent mode, losing altitude at a speed of 6-8 m/s. The siren sounded and the red display flashed in the cockpit. But none of the crew paid attention to this.
At the 70th second of the flight, when the Tu-154 was only 90 meters from the surface of the water, the PIC abruptly turned the aircraft, which was turning with a slight right bank of about 10°, into a steep left bank of 53°. The plane rushed to the surface of the water three times faster, at a speed of 20 m/s, and was already doomed.
At the 73rd second of flight, the Tu-154, at a speed of 540 km/h and a left roll of about 50, touched the surface of the sea with its left wing, fell apart and sank.
The report of Lieutenant General Baynetov indicated that the emergence of a critical situation on board the Tu-154 was facilitated by the “emotional and physiological fatigue” of commander Volkov, as well as his lack of “sustainable skills” in piloting in difficult situations.
Experienced military pilots, whom we asked to comment on the commission’s conclusions about the causes of the Sochi disaster and the document distributed on the Internet, similar to the report of the head of the Aviation Safety Service of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, agreed that there were many inconsistencies in both the official report and the “document.”
Our experts noticed that at the Sochi airport the planes taxi to the start behind the escort vehicle. In addition, the airport is equipped with illuminated taxiway and runway number signs. It is almost impossible to get lost at Sochi airport. If Major Volkov is already “lost” on the ground, a take-off ban should immediately follow.
It is impossible to explain what happened after takeoff:
“Unless there has been collective insanity,” said one of our experts. “The actions of both the captain and the crew are absolutely inadequate. The actions of the rudders (especially the rudder - from the pedals) after takeoff cannot be explained normally. The flight speed indicated in the document allows the plane to stay in the air, but a normal, trained, tested and approved pilot for this type of flight could not allow such actions with the rudders.
The actual withdrawal of the co-pilot and navigator also defies explanation:
— The crew sees that the PIC is making one fatal mistake after another, and does nothing. This is impossible in military transport aviation.
“We can assume that KPP-1 (the flight control instrument is the main instrument of any aircraft) failed,” another of our interlocutors suggested. — The “document” says about its direct indication, they say, it’s difficult. Yes, it's difficult. During retraining, on the simulator. And Volkov was an experienced pilot. In addition, KPP-1 has a backup attitude indicator AGR-72.
Our experts noticed that the “document” says that the landing gear was removed, but in all the photographs of the collected debris of the crashed Tu-154, the landing gear is in the extended position.
One of our experts, a military transport aviation veteran with more than 10 thousand flight hours, of which about 4 thousand as a Tu-154 crew commander, continues to adhere to the version that Novaya published back in March. Our interlocutor suggests that the full-time commander of the Tu-154 crew, Major Roman Volkov, acted as a co-pilot during takeoff, although he was in his seat, and the pilot who took off was not only not trained and not authorized to fly this type of aircraft, but also not included in the flight mission, senior in rank and position. Yes, he had extensive flying experience, but on other types of aircraft, for example on the An-72. On board the crashed plane there was indeed a senior instructor-pilot of military unit 42829, a lieutenant colonel. And he flew precisely on the An-72.
The “document”, positioned as the report of Lieutenant General Sergei Baynetov, is very similar to the real one, but our experts do not rule out that it is a fake, made “on the basis” of the real document.
