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It’s understood that 38 people have died after Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 crashed near the city of Aktau, Kazakhstan on Christmas Day.
The flight had originally departed from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and was headed for Grozny in Chechnya, Russia but was ultimately rerouted due to fog. Footage later saw the plane attempting an emergency landing in the western city of Aktau, but ultimately burst into flames just moments are touching down on the runway.
29 people survived the crash, with Sky News reporting that 37 of the passengers onboard were Azerbaijani citizens, 16 Russian, six Kazakhstani and three Kyrgyzstani.
According to Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Kanat Bozumbayev, 11 people were in critical condition after being pulled from the wreckage, while one survivor remained unidentified as of 26 December.
“The bodies are in poor condition, mostly burnt, all collected,” he added, via CNN. “Now they will be in the morgue, and identification will take place.”
An investigation into the cause of the crash is currently ongoing, with the carrier stating that ‘external physical and technical interference’ was the reason.
An investigation is currently underway into what caused the plane to crash (Meiramgul Kussainova/Anadolu via Getty Images)
While an official cause is yet to be determined, a report published by Reuters suggests that Russian air defence systems may be at fault for downing the plane.
This theory is also said to be backed up by US military sources.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has also instructed his government to set up a commission to look into the crash.
“The commission’s task is to fully investigate the matter, examine the causes of the crash and all its details, and provide information both to me and to the Azerbaijani public,” he said in an official briefing on Wednesday, adding that a criminal case has been ‘launched’.
38 people died in the devastating accident (Emergency Situations of Kazakhstan/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Russian president Vladimir Putin has since spoken to the Azerbaijani leader, apologising for the ‘tragic incident’ without saying that Russia was responsible.
“(President) Vladimir Putin apologised for the tragic incident that occurred in Russian airspace and once again expressed his deep and sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to the injured,” an official statement from the Kremlin released today (28 December) read, via BBC.
Azerbaijan Airlines has since suspended flights to five Russian airports, citing concerns about ‘potential risks to flight safety’ per a report from The Guardian.
Featured Image Credit: EuroNews / ISSA TAZHENBAYEV/AFP via Getty Images
Topics: World News, Russia, Travel
One of the most tragic incidents in aviation history took place just over 30 years ago.
Aeroflot Flight 593 – carrying 63 passengers and 12 flight crew – was being flown by experienced airline captain Andrew Viktorovich Danilov of Russia back in 1994.
The 23 March flight successfully departured from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, Russia to Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong shortly after midnight.
Danilov, who had 9,500 hours worth of in-flight experience, was joined by first officer Igor Vasilyevich Piskaryov (5,885 hours) and relief captain Yaroslav Vladimirovich Kudrinsky (8,940 hours).
Travelling on board were the captain’s two children on their first international trip with their father.
As the aircraft cruised towards its final destination on autopilot, the majority of its 63 passengers were asleep.
At 00:43, Kudrinsky’s daughter, 13, sat in her father’s seat, manually adjusting the autopilot’s heading setting so it made her feel like she was ‘flying’ the plane.
At 00:51, Kudrinsky let his son, 15 – for reasons unknown – essentially take control of the plane, possibly believing that because autopilot was controlling the aircraft, and that the 15-year-old’s actions would have no effect.
At 00:54, the teenager manipulated the control stick for over 30 seconds with inputs up to 10 kilograms, which contradicted the input made by the autopilot to keep the aircraft stable and straight, and changed the flight control settings to manual.
The plane was en-route to Hong Kong (YouTube/MorfoAtari)
Nobody onboard realised that he was in control of the aircraft but when autopilot tried to regain control, it conflicted with the boy’s controls, which had increased to inputs of 12 and 13 kg.
Eventually, this led to the disconnection of the autopilot servo from the aileron control linkage.
The pilots missed a non-audible warning light, as they had mostly flown Russian-built aircraft and were unfamiliar with the Airbus setup.
The aircraft then entered a bank, with the autopilot unable to maintain altitude due to the angle of the wings.
Captain Kudrinsky then ordered the co-pilot to take control as he got his son away from his seat so he could take command of the aircraft.
After re-adjusting his seat due to auto-pilot settings, the bank angle had increased to 90 degrees, with the A310 unable to turn from such a steep angle.
The plane lost control and eventually crashed, killing everyone onboard (YouTube/MorfoAtari)
With the pilots left to fend for themselves, they managed to recover the aircraft’s dive, though over corrected and sent the plane into an almost vertical climb, stalling and sending it into a spin.
It began to lose altitude, and eventually descended beneath the minimum safe altitude for the flight at the section of its route over mountainous terrain.
At 00:59, air traffic control in nearby Novokuznetsk were waiting for a position update through radio transmission from the flight, but it never came, as the flight stopped appearing on their radar screens.
It turns out that at 00:58, just two minutes and six seconds after the events unfolded, Flight 593 crashed in a flat altitude at high vertical speed, estimated to be around 160mph, in the Kuznetsk Alatau Mountain range in the Kemerovo Oblast region of southern Russia.
The aircraft was destroyed, killing everyone onboard.
Despite Aeroflot initially denying that the pilots were at fault, it was forced to change its account of events when a leaked copy of the cockpit voice recorder transcript was published.
Additional words by Joshua Nair
