“Unless it’s collective insanity. The mystery of the tragedy near Sochi has been revealed. Final conclusions on that 154

The cause of the disaster of the Tu-154B-2 aircraft, which crashed in Sochi on December 25, 2016, was a violation of the spatial orientation of the aircraft commander, Major Roman Volkov, which led to his erroneous actions with the aircraft controls. This follows from documents with the commission’s findings distributed on the Internet.

The published documents say that after the plane was launched while taxiing in Sochi, the commander “experienced difficulties in determining his location on the airfield due to his understanding of the upcoming take-off course.” That is, Volkov did not know which runway he would take off from, but began “emotionally asking the crew about the takeoff course” only seven seconds into the flight and at a speed of 70 km/h.

“Unidentified radio communication with the use of profanity and increasing emotional tension in the crew during the take-off phase led to the PIC’s failure to monitor significant take-off parameters and the distraction of crew members from performing their functional duties at this stage of the flight,” the conclusion says.

At the 53rd second of the flight at an altitude of 157 m, the commander gave the command to retract the flaps, despite the fact that this had to be done at an altitude of 500 m. After this, the PIC made mistakes when using the aircraft controls (yoke and pedals) and ignored the alarm. SSOS systems (alarm system for dangerous speed of approach to the ground) and light signaling about the amount of roll. Due to errors by the crew, the plane began to descend so that it was no longer possible to avoid a collision with the ground.

From the conclusion:

As a result, the plane descended at a speed of 34 m/s and collided with the water surface at the 73rd second of flight.

The commission came to the conclusion that “the disturbance of the pilot’s spatial orientation could have been contributed to by: the resulting excessive neuropsychic stress caused by a combination of a number of situational professional and psychological stress factors against the background of natural emotional and physiological fatigue; lack of stable skills in distributing attention and maintaining specified flight parameters during takeoff and climb; “direct” indication of the aircraft’s spatial position in roll on the flight control instrument (PKP-1).”

“The accident was facilitated by omissions in the control of flight organization, objective control and flight methodological work by the management staff of the 800th aviation base (special purpose) and the air force command of the High Command of the Aerospace Forces,” says the conclusion of the commission investigating the accident .

Let us remind you that the plane crash occurred on December 25, 2016. The Ministry of Defense plane took off from Adler airport at 5:20 Moscow time to Syria; while performing a maneuver over the Russian Black Sea, the airliner disappeared from the radar. There were 92 people on the plane, including soloists of the ensemble named after. Alexandrova, Elizaveta Glinka (Dr. Lisa) and journalists. They all died.

Independent technical expert Yuri Antipov criticized the official version of the Ministry of Defense about the crash of the Tu-154 plane in Sochi.

He said that the Ministry of Defense chose the most harmless version of the plane crash, guided by the principle “it will be better for everyone.” The remaining versions, in his opinion, were discarded in the first hours after the disaster. For example, an explosion on board. It couldn't exist because it couldn't exist. No particles of the substance were found on the wreckage. However, Antipov recalls that at that time very few remains of the car were recovered from the water. As a result, the official version was a pilot error.

The charges against the aircraft commander, Volkov, are based on the obtained flight parameters read from the “black boxes”. Moreover, the technical data of the flight are presented in such a meager form that it was possible to obtain them in such a volume in literally a few hours. But to give heavy weight During the course of the investigation and creating more “fog” in the investigation, the Ministry of Defense announced that reading data from recorders is a problem on a universal scale, Antipov said.

He added that experts completely removed all information from the flight recorders. Otherwise it can not be. But if it were made public, a competent expert could immediately determine the reasons for the fall. However, Antipov is trying to understand the reasons even on the basis of those fragments that are freely available.

The plane landed in Adler at 3:43. It took off at 5:24. Thus, for more than an hour and a half, the Tu-154 was in Adler only for refueling without passengers leaving, which in itself is a gross violation of safety regulations. According to regulatory documents, full refueling of a Tu-154 using standard TZ 22 or TZ 16 tankers takes only 18-20 minutes. But it turns out that we spent an hour and a half just refueling,” Antipov explained.

The expert noted another important detail. The takeoff took place at an angle of 238 degrees. He notes that according to documents from the Ministry of Defense, the plane was lightly loaded. But after the takeoff began, the voice of the ship’s commander, Volkov, suddenly became nervous, although a minute ago everything was in order. Another important detail is that Volkov asked to start the takeoff from the beginning of the runway.

The plane lifted off from the runway at 34 seconds of takeoff at a speed of 300 km/h. For the take-off of the Tu-154 with its high power supply, 210 km/h is sufficient. But when fully loaded, this minimum lift-off speed has to be raised to 250-270 km/h. To check this data, instead of reading dry regulatory documents, just watch the first film “Crew” with Georgy Zhzhenov in the title role. There, the take-off process and the required speed of the Tu-154 are shown very clearly,” Antipov said.

At the 19th second of the flight, the command to retract the flaps was sounded. The plane gained a height of 157 meters. The plane flew the same heading of 238 degrees. After the wing mechanization was retracted, the climb continued. That is, until the 29th second of the flight, despite the flaps being retracted, the climb continued.

And then in the report of the Ministry of Defense there is a cunning florid phrase. I quote it verbatim: “The further situation was characterized by the absence of actions by the aircraft controls that were adequate to the change in flight parameters...”. And immediately, in continuation of this intricate phrase, which the Ministry of Defense presents as a weighty 100% argument, the conclusion follows: “... which was due to a violation of the spatial orientation of the PIC.” This is the main idea of ​​almost six months of attempts by the Ministry of Defense, which, in essence, sentences PIC Volkov, the expert provides information.

To better understand what was written by the Ministry of Defense, Antipov gives an analogy with motor transport. The driver is driving along a straight highway in a car. His actions are recorded by the car recorder. Suddenly, a force majeure circumstance arises on the road (a hole, a sharply flat tire, a broken tie rod, and so on). That is, something happened that forced the steering wheel to change position in order to try to keep the car on the road. The recorder in the car, equipped with GPS, will record in its memory that, while moving along a straight section of the road, the driver, completely unreasonably, suddenly began to vigorously rotate the steering wheel. That is, his actions were inadequate to the environment. And the verdict could be this: the driver’s actions were due to “violation of spatial orientation.”

The plane took off at a heading of 238 degrees. According to the MoD report, only after 63 seconds (10 seconds before the fall) did the captain begin to move the ship to the left with pedals and the steering wheel. Although the report says that at the time of the left turn at 63 seconds, the plane was banking to the right (i.e., turning to the right on a course of more than 238 degrees). I’ll play along with the MO and take for simplicity that even at 63 seconds of flight the course was still 238 degrees. In other words, he was on the imaginary straight line of the runway. The MoD report says that at 73 seconds the plane collided with the sea surface, being on a course of 220 degrees, at a speed of 540 km/h, a roll to the left of 50 degrees and a vertical speed of approach to the sea of ​​30 m/sec. In other words, the plane, in a steep bank to the left, actually fell,” Antipov explained.

Next, the expert cites calculations that show that such a change in course is impossible in a normal flight. According to the Tu-154 piloting theory, being in the steepest turn with a bank of 60 degrees (this is much more than the Tu-154 had in Adler) and moving at a speed of 550 km/h, the minimum turning radius is 13,350 meters. That is, the Tu-154 can make a complete 360-degree turn in at least nine minutes.

In other words, in a normal flight, even in a very steep turn with a bank angle of 60 degrees and a speed of 550 km/h, the Tu-154 will not be able to change course by 18 degrees in less than 27 seconds. In the case in Adler, the course change of 18 degrees occurred in less than 10 seconds. In fact, the change in 10 seconds occurred at an even greater angle, because the course 10 seconds before the fall (remember the Moscow Ministry of Defense and the fact that the pilot steered the plane to the right) changed upward, the expert explained.

So what made the plane change course so sharply and quickly, which under normal conditions, according to its technical data, simply cannot be done?

- “Energetic” actions of Captain Volkov? No. While flying a serviceable aircraft with proper mechanization, he is simply not able to do this. Only an emergency situation on board could provide energy and quickly turn the plane around. It was this sudden situation that Volkov tried to cope with in his last seconds of life, fighting for the survivability of the aircraft with so-called “inadequate” actions. “He didn’t sit and watch indifferently what was happening,” Antipov answered his own question.

The expert went on to say that the force that caused the plane to turn so quickly was either a complete loss of symmetry in aerodynamics (or engine thrust), or the action of a sudden force acting on the fuselage of the plane in the transverse direction. Or both at the same time.

Under these conditions, according to Antipov, only an explosion on board is suitable, destroying the symmetrical structure of the Tu-154 and quickly turning the aircraft around with its energy.

I'll ask a few more questions. For what reasons did the inner surface of the fuselage skin of the front cargo compartment change its color and how did a plastic piece with melted edges end up among the belongings of the victims, recovered from the crash site? But I think the questions will remain unanswered,” Antipov concluded.

After a complete decoding of the flight recorders - parametric and voice - experts from the Ministry of Defense can actually pinpoint the causes of the Tu-154 crash in the waters of Sochi. In their opinion, the passenger plane crashed into the Black Sea for several reasons.

Tu-154 takes off from Sochi after refueling. Photo: Fyodor Borisov/Global Look

A source familiar with the investigation into the causes of the crash said that the human factor was recognized as the main version of the plane crash. According to him, “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 activated, the aircraft began to sharply lose altitude due to problems with the flaps,” because the co-pilot removed them instead of chassis.

The problem was made worse by overloading the plane. The luggage compartment was filled to capacity. Therefore, the tail section of the Tu-154 was pulled down. And it was impossible to save him: there was not enough speed and height for this. The tail touched the water first, then the side high speed hit the sea with its right wing and broke up.

For the crew, the emergency situation came as a complete surprise: in the first seconds, the aircraft commander and co-pilot were confused, but quickly regained their composure and tried to save the plane until the last seconds.

Phrases from the co-pilot and the ship's commander make it clear that there was a problem with the flaps, after which the alarm sounded. This became clear after specialists from the Research Center for Operation and Repair of Aircraft Equipment of the Ministry of Defense in Lyubertsy studied the black box data.

The pilots who flew the Tu-154 confirmed the conclusions of experts from the Ministry of Defense that the cause of the plane crash could have been pilot error. They explained that “the handles for retracting the landing gear and flaps are located on the canopy of the pilot’s cabin, between them, above the windshield, and 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.” . Also, the pilots added, it is impossible to exclude the possibility that after takeoff the crew exceeded the speed and the flap mechanism collapsed, which is why the plane fell to the right, lost speed and crashed into the water.

An additional factor in the plane crash near 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.

At the same time, engineers at the Research Center for Operation and Repair of Aircraft Equipment of the Ministry of Defense in Lyubertsy do not rule out that the plane had a good chance of salvation, but overload prevented it.

The Ministry of Defense, writes TASS, denied the publication about the preliminary causes of the crash of the Tu-154 military aircraft and called it “absolute nonsense and fiction.”

Meanwhile, the work of the commission to investigate the plane crash continues. As official representative of the Ministry of Defense Igor Konashenkov stated, until all necessary actions are completed, it is unacceptable and immoral to try to “unfoundedly accuse someone and invent some conclusions.”

Previously, there was information that the cause of the Tu-154 crash could have been a technical malfunction or pilot error. Prior to this, the assumption was that an extreme situation arose on board, which did not allow the crew to transmit a distress signal.

The crash of the Tu-154 of the Ministry of Defense with tail number RA-85572 on December 25, 2016. This happened 1.7 km from the coast of Sochi. The plane was en route to Syrian Khmeimim from the Chkalovsky airfield. In Sochi he was refueling. There were 92 people on board the liner - 83 passengers and 8 crew members, all of them died.

Over the Black Sea, became the 73rd liner of this family lost as a result 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 complicated for mass production. passenger airliner and requires high qualifications of both 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.

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, the operation of the Tu-154 was stopped " Ural Airlines" 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 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. By 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 cleaning, at high take-off weight, in conditions of a high-mountain airfield and high air temperature. 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 regular flight on the route Karshi - Ufa - Leningrad, 46 minutes after departure at an altitude of 11 thousand 600 m, it 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 total waking time of the pilots amounting to almost 24 hours. And soon after the flight began, the crew fell asleep.

07.12.1995, Khabarovsk region, 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 their best to keep the plane in the air, but uncontrollable airliner crashed to the ground near the village of Glubokoye, Kamensky district, Rostov region and completely collapsed. 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

Presidential airliner Tu-154M Air Force Poland was carrying out a flight 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.