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Various versions of the crash of an Embraer 190 aircraft belonging to Azerbaijan Airlines on December 25 near the city of Aktau, Kazakhstan, are in circulation. The aircraft, which was carrying 67 people, including crew members, was flying from Baku to Grozny. The crash resulted in the deaths of 38 people and the injury of 29, 11 of whom are in severe condition.
Kazakh law enforcement agencies have opened a criminal case on two articles: negligence and violation of traffic safety and air transport operation rules, which resulted in two or more deaths.
Fact Investigation Platform has studied the information reported by various parties about the plane crash and combined all the facts about the air disaster.
Azerbaijan has declared a day of mourning today, December 26, as a result of the plane crash. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that he has information that the Baku-Grozny plane changed its route due to bad weather conditions and headed to the airport in the Kazakh city of Aktau. “The accident occurred on that route during landing. There is footage of the plane crash on social networks and in the media. However, the causes of the disaster are not yet known. There are various hypothesis. I think it is too soon to talk about it. A full investigation should be carried out,” Aliyev said.
According to Flightradar24, the Azerbaijani airline flight J2-8243 significantly deviated from its planned route and, having passed from Baku, passing for kilometers along one coast of the Caspian Sea, crossed the sea and appeared on its opposite coast, in Aktau.
The image clearly shows that the plane had controllability problems before landing in Aktau. In the final stages of the flight, the plane periodically turned right and left, lost and gained altitude. For example, at one point its altitude dropped to 700 feet (about 250 meters), then rose again to 5,000 feet (about 2 km) and then descended again, after which it crashed into the ground, again making irregular right and left turns during this time.
Bad weather conditions hypothesis
In Grozny, at around 8:20-9:00 on the morning of December 25, when the plane was expected to land at the Grozny airport, the weather conditions were indeed bad, it was foggy. In the morning hours, when the plane was supposed to land, visibility was 4 km.
This hypothesis is not widely spread in the sources, it is almost not discussed, because according to some sources, if fog had been the cause of the crash, the plane could have landed, for example, in Makhachkala or Vladikavkaz and would not have continued the flight further to Aktau. At the airport of Uytash (Makhachkala), according to the flight schedule, planes landed at those hours.
It is noteworthy that on the morning of the same day, UTair flights UT355 and UT356 from Moscow to Grozny and Grozny to Moscow arrived and departed from Vladikavkaz instead of Grozny, which once again speaks of some problems at the Grozny airport, but also indicates that the Vladikavkaz airport could have received planes at those hours.
Therefore, even if there were weather problems at the Grozny airport, in that case the Azerbaijani plane could have landed in other nearby cities instead of flying several hundred kilometers and reaching Kazakhstan.
Bird strike or air defense missile strike
Russian aviation officially announced that, according to preliminary data, the plane’s commander decided to divert to an alternate airport due to a bird strike, and as a result, Aktau airport was chosen.
It should be noted that the risk of a bird strike exists only during takeoff and landing. Birds are usually not present at high altitudes. The plane had climbed to 30,000 feet (about 10 km) after leaving Baku that day. If a bird strike had occurred in Baku, it would have returned to Baku and not continued the flight. At the same time, it is also not known whether the plane attempted to land in Grozny or anywhere else before the alarm was sounded, which suggests that the plane had not collided with birds at the time of the emergency signal.
An aviation expert interviewed by Reuters considered the bird strike hypothesis unlikely. “Officials have not explained why the plane crossed the sea, but the crash occurred after drone attacks in southern Russia,” Reuters wrote, noting that the authorities of Ingushetia and North Ossetia, which border Chechnya, announced drone strikes on their territories on the morning of December 25.
Plane crash survivors said they heard an explosion. “I heard two explosions, I don’t know what kind of explosion it was, but it was serious. Panic broke out, the flight attendants were forced to explain what was happening,” said one of the rescued passengers.
The Telegram channel Baza has shared videos showing the unburned parts of the crashed plane. They clearly show traces (numerous small holes) very similar to the shrapnel damage on the rear of the plane.
The damage was most noticeable in the tail of the plane, near the so-called elevators (small wings at the rear of the plane), which, by all accounts, explains the problems with the plane’s controllability (including altitude control), which were also visible in the flightradar24 system at the end of the flight.
It is noteworthy that Russian Z bloggers are already expressing doubts that the civilian plane was hit by an anti-aircraft missile. Yuri Podolyaka has stated that the consequences of a missile strike are exactly that. At the same time, Russian state propaganda is promoting the hypothesis of a collision with birds and the explosion of an “oxygen cylinder” on the plane as a result.
Military analyst Yan Matveyev, having analyzed the information and combing the facts, also concluded that the civilian plane was most likely hit by missiles.
The thing is that air defense (AD) missiles generally do not physically touch the targets (in this case, the aircraft), but explode a few meters away, ensuring the target is hit by numerous fragments.
This was exactly how the Malaysian Airlines Boeing-777 was shot down by Russian forces over Ukraine in 2014. According to the investigation, the BUK missile hit the plane a few meters away, ensuring a fragment hit.
Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Center for Countering Disinformation under the National Security Council of Ukraine, announced that the Embraer 190 aircraft was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile system. “Russia should have closed the airspace over Grozny, but it did not do so. The aircraft was hit by a Russian missile and was sent to Kazakhstan instead of making an emergency landing in Grozny and saving people’s lives,” he said.
And the reason for the air defense missile strike did exist: there were strikes from drones in Chechnya that morning, which was also confirmed by the Secretary of the Chechen Security Council, Hamzat Kadyrov, who is a relative of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. However, official Russian sources have not reported any information about this. The Kommersant wrote about the implementation of an operational plan called “Kovyor” at the Grozny airport (when the airport does not accept aircraft).
On the morning of December 25, drones also fell in Ingushetia, as announced by the head of the district, Mahmud Ali Kalimatov, and in Vladikavkaz, drone fragments fell in the Alania Mall, causing a fire. In other words, during the flight hours, an anti-aircraft battle was clearly underway on the Baku-Grozny route, during which Russian air defense systems tried to shoot down Ukrainian drones.
Thus, of the three main hypothesis of the plane crash that claimed the lives of more than three dozen people, the main one is that of a missile strike. Official circles are still silent about this. The plane’s black boxes have already been found at the crash site, the deciphering of which may shed light on what happened. Russia still does not admit the participation of its armed forces in the 2014 downing of the Malaysian Boeing 777 with a missile.
Recently, by the way, Fact Investigation Platform addressed the claims of Russian circles about the dangers of French air defense systems to civil aviation and recalled that it is Russian air defense systems that have been the cause of the downing of civilian aircraft in recent decades.
Hasmik Hambardumyan
Daniel Ioannisyan
