The Russian An-148 passenger plane crashed in the Moscow region on February 11. All 65 passengers and crew members were killed. Rescuers reported that the debris was scattered over 30 hectares, but both black boxes were found relatively quickly. Ivbg.ru figured out what a black box is, what it looks like and what it is needed for
What is a black box?
The black box is the name given to the flight recorder on an airplane. It records instrument readings, pilot conversations and sounds in the cabin. Black box data is used to analyze crew actions, aircraft performance, and air crash investigations.
Why is a recorder called a black box?
Few people know, but the so-called black box is orange or red. The recorder is specially painted in bright colors to make it easier to find after a plane crash. For the same reason, the box is made not square, but cylindrical, in order to minimize physical damage upon contact with a hard surface.
The black box got its name thanks to its creators. In 1939, two Frenchmen, Usseno and Baudouin, presented the first model of a recorder. The data was recorded using a thin beam of light and ordinary photographic film. The designers painted the box black so as not to expose the film. In the middle of the last century, recorders were not a mandatory attribute of airliners. In 1957, the black box was replaced by an orange cylinder.
How many recorders are on the plane?
Until 1957, black boxes only recorded instrument readings. But after the still-unsolved crash in 1953 of the world's first British jet passenger airliner, Comet 1, in which 35 people were killed, Australian scientist David Warren came to the idea that conversations between the pilots could help the investigation. Four years later, he presented to the world his recorder, capable of recording both instrument parameters and crew conversations.
Today there are two types of black boxes: operational and emergency. The first transmits readings to the control room on the ground. The second one records all information cyclically - the data is rewritten every two hours. It is installed in the tail section of the aircraft, because according to statistics, the tail is less likely to be destroyed during a fall. To be on the safe side, there may be several recorders on the plane.
Why isn't the black box destroyed when it explodes?
The cylindrical body of the box is made of titanium or high-strength steel. Requirements for the technical characteristics of a recorder are growing in direct proportion to technological progress. In addition to the force of impact on the ground, the device must withstand 30 minutes of continuous burning and month-long storage under water at a depth of six kilometers.
What's inside the cylinder?
The electronic boards inside the case are installed on additional shock absorbers to minimize the consequences of a powerful impact on a hard surface. The microcircuits are protected by a heat-protective layer. The drive that records data looks like a regular computer's hard drive.
An ultrasonic beacon is installed on the recorder, which facilitates searches under water. There are also light and radio beacons on the body. These devices have standard signal frequencies so as not to confuse them with other sources.
For autonomous operation of the beacons, batteries are installed. During the flight they do not work, and the recorder receives energy from the aircraft systems. The batteries are activated after a strong shock.
What parameters does the device record?
The first models of the box recorded only speed, height, direction, acceleration and time. Modern instruments record 256 parameters. Among them: air pressure, fuel consumption, helm stroke, engine speed, barometric altitude, etc.
How is data decrypted?
Contrary to popular belief, the recorder data is not encrypted with a complex code. The records are made in a form convenient for perception and further analysis. After all, the main purpose of the recorder is to assist in the investigation of plane crashes.
Often data is lost due to destruction. In this case, specialists restore lost memory. This process takes months of painstaking work.
Where else are black boxes used?
Recorders are installed on trains, water transport and cars. The operating principle of these boxes is no different from a similar device on an airplane. In railway terminology, a recorder is called a locomotive speedometer, in automobile terminology - an autometer.
During the investigation into the causes of plane crashes, they hope to decipher the black box recordings to understand what happened. And, I must say, it is not pleasant to hear the voices of those who in most cases know that they will die in a moment.
The plane crashed in the Ramensky district of the Moscow region. Of the 71 people on board, none survived. The cause was an error by the co-pilot and icing of the speed sensors. Below you can find a text transcript of the conversation between the pilots, where the PIC is the aircraft commander, and the VP is the co-pilot.
KVS: Up! Here.
VP: Now, now.
KVS: And you down...
VP: Actually, some kind of bullshit!
KVS: No, well, as I understand it, you wanted it... And you, on the contrary, are down.
VP: Then we’ll talk. So, we control everything!
KVS: Everything, everything is fine.
VP: That's it, the speed has returned to normal.
VP: Oop-op-op! 390!
PIC: Where down?! Where are you going down? Why down?! Where?!
ALARM: Compare speed, compare speed.
VP: Yes, because *** is good, 200 speed, ***!
PIC: Height! Height! Height!
KVS: Up!
ALARM: Terrain ahead! Pull up! Terrain ahead!
PIC: That's it, ***.
Other transcripts are provided in audio format.
The plane attempted to reland after a missed approach and went into a tailspin. During the disaster, 62 people died (7 crew members and 55 passengers). The reason for the vessel's rapid descent was the simultaneous pushback of the steering wheel and the deflection of the stabilizer into a dive.
During the takeoff run, the plane collided with an airfield snowplow, broke up and caught fire. Four French citizens on board, including the manager of the major oil and gas company Total, Christophe de Margerie, were killed. The plane crash occurred after a number of violations.
During the takeoff run along the runway at Yaroslavl Tunoshna Airport in normal weather conditions, the plane rolled off the runway. It took off from the ground 400 meters beyond the end of the runway. From that moment on, it gained a height of 5-6 meters, collided with a radio beacon, crashed into the ground and exploded. The Lokomotiv hockey club was on board at that time. 44 people died in the plane crash. The reason was said to be when one of the pilots pressed the brake pedal while the airliner was taking off.
The airliner was flying on the Moscow-Perm route. At the final point, he was already landing, but did not reach Bolshoye Savino airport 11 kilometers. The plane crashed to the ground and was completely destroyed, leaving no survivors of the 88 people on board. Experts named the reason as the shortcomings of the entire crew training system for flights, as well as the lack of interaction within the crew.
The airliner crashed on approach to Irkutsk, where it was supposed to make an intermediate landing during the flight Ekaterinburg-Vladivostok. During the turn and landing approach, the plane turned 180 degrees and began to fall. The cause of the accident was that the crew did not maintain the established altitude of 850 meters during landing. The co-pilot tried to correct the error by pulling the steering wheel towards himself. The plane completely lost control and crashed, killing 144 people.
To understand why the An-148 plane crashed in the Moscow region, black boxes will help. We found out what they are, what color they really are and why they don’t crash with the plane.
What is a black box on an airplane?
This name was given to on-board recorders - devices that record the operating parameters of all aircraft systems throughout the flight, as well as crew conversations. In fact, black boxes are installed not only on airplanes, but also on railway and water transport. If any emergency suddenly occurs, the data from the on-board recorders helps to find out the causes of the incident.
What color are black boxes really?
In fact, so-called black boxes are bright orange or red in color. It is this shade that is easiest to detect among the debris. Moreover, the “boxes” are not shaped like a box at all, but like a ball or a cylinder.
This device received the name “black box” because of its top secrecy: the first recorders could only be serviced by special employees. All details were strictly classified. Such measures were taken in order to ensure maximum objectivity in the investigation of disasters.
Why doesn't the black box collapse with the plane?
The fact is that these devices are made from titanium alloys. On the outside they are covered with a layer of asbestos. The result is a high-strength and heat-resistant material.
To make it easier to detect flight recorders; radio beacons and acoustic sound emitters are built into them. In the event of an accident, they turn on automatically.
And yet, sometimes the boxes get destroyed. However, they are designed in such a way that it is possible to restore at least part of the information.
How do black boxes work?
All data is recorded on flash drives (in modern models) or on magnetic media (metal wire or magnetic tape). This information can then be read and decrypted. By the way, the concept of “decipher” is used to mean “write off” or “count” - that is, convert data into text. In fact, there is no protection of data from outsiders in black boxes, because they are intended primarily to understand the causes of disasters and reduce their number, and not to hide data.
How many black boxes are there on the plane and what are they?
There are two types of on-board recorders: operational and emergency. Operational is needed so that ground personnel can control the actions of the crew. As a rule, it does not have special protection and therefore is often destroyed. It is located in the cockpit. The emergency recorder, as the name suggests, is used in disaster investigations. He has reliable protection. This recorder is located at the rear of the aircraft. Usually there are several black boxes in the liner. It is assumed that in the event of a disaster at least one will survive.
The MK correspondent found out what pilots usually say before a disaster and why only women are trusted to restore flight recorder tapes
On November 17, a Boeing 737 of Tatarstan Airlines crashed during landing. All passengers and crew members on the plane died. The only witnesses to what caused the pilots to throw the plane into a deadly tailspin are “black boxes.” But sometimes they are silent.
They searched for the voice recorder from the plane that crashed in Kazan for several days: when it hit the ground, the drive flew out of the recording device. It was badly damaged. Will experts be able to completely recreate the pilots' negotiations? In what situations is it impossible to obtain information from the on-board recorder? And why do specialists turn to the Institute of Forensic Science for help when decoding voice recorders? To understand how “black boxes” are deciphered, the MK correspondent went to the Research Center for the Operation and Repair of Aviation Equipment of the Ministry of Defense, where they have been investigating plane crashes for seventy years. But if MAK deals with “civilian” recorders, “black boxes” from military aircraft end up here. However, the principle of decrypting and restoring data in both departments is identical.
At the entrance of this brick building on the outskirts of Lyubertsy there is no sign with the name of the enterprise - only a modest inscription: “Bureau of Passes.” There is no sign with the house number on the wall. But even in Soviet times, local residents knew what the specialists working here had to deal with. It is no coincidence that the ERAT Research Center has long been given an unofficial name: Research Institute of “Black Boxes”.
Here they investigated the death of Gagarin and found out the reason for the crash of the An-124 transport into residential buildings near Irkutsk in December 1997. Now they are looking into the cause of the death of the Kazakh MiG-31 and the Ka-52 helicopter, which frightened the residents of Moscow Zhulebin several months ago.
— In fact, “black boxes” are just a cog in the mechanism of investigating aircraft accidents, a prelude. In our center, all components of fallen aircraft are examined. But it is the “black boxes” that tell specialists the direction in which they need to move, says Yuri Popov, leading researcher at the ERAT Research Center. “Therefore, the investigation of any plane crash begins with the study of the data from the recorders.
Doesn't burn in fire and doesn't drown in water
At the stand of the speech information research laboratory, “black boxes” are displayed in a row - orange spheres, capsules, cylinders. Perfectly smooth, with the inscriptions written on the bright sides: “Emergency recorder. Do not open."
Nearby are similar ones, but brought from the sites of plane crashes. After falling from a height of many kilometers and spending several hours in the fire, the titanium armor, a couple of centimeters thick, shrank and cracked, like a tin can thrown into the fire. Mangled, with soot-covered sides—these recorders are found among the wreckage of crashed planes.
— It is clear that the orange sphere is only a shell for the device itself. The recorder is located inside,” leading researcher at the ERAT Research Center Vasily Svintsov approaches the metal orange ball, unscrews the screws, and lifts the lid. When opened, the container looks like a saucepan or pressure cooker. By the way, not only the MK correspondent had associations with kitchen utensils. In aviation slang, this type of recorder has long been dubbed “pots”.
Armor for recorders is cast from titanium or heavy-duty steel. The cavity between the body and the mechanical filling is filled with special plastic.
This is what solid-state recorders look like: the board (4) is protected by its own armor (3), which is placed in a titanium case (1, 2).
— When exposed to fire, this material foams, providing protection from high temperatures. Previously, fire-resistant asbestos was used for the same purposes,” explains Vasily Petrovich.
In fact, only the first of the on-board registration systems mass-produced in the USSR have a spherical shape - this is what “black boxes” are called in aviator parlance.
— For some reason, it was believed that it was this design that provided the device with the greatest strength. In practice, this was not confirmed: in more than half of the cases, after a serious accident, such an armored cap broke into pieces like an eggshell. It is clear that the film inside was not preserved. Now they are gradually being abandoned. Among civilian aircraft, such aircraft are installed only on the Tu-134; among military aircraft, such aircraft are installed on the An-12, An-22, and some models of helicopters.
The armor of modern recorders has the shape of a cylinder, capsule or even parallelepiped.
— There are a huge number of modifications. Each manufacturer develops a form based on the location where the recorder will be installed. For example, the first generation of foreign ones was made in the form of a tablet, then models were introduced in the form of a loaf of Darnitsa bread. Nowadays, they are increasingly placed in a cylindrical body,” explains Yuri Popov, leading researcher at the ERAT Research Center. — The armor of recorders used today is already many times stronger: after the transition to flash media, which takes up less space, it became possible to devote a larger volume to armor protection.
Modern recorders are capable of being in a fire for an hour at a temperature of 1100 degrees. They will quietly lie for more than a month in water at a depth of six kilometers. The body cannot withstand the impact of a falling weight weighing 226 kilograms with a tip with a diameter of only six millimeters.
But this is not enough. The recent disaster in Kazan is further confirmation of this.
Why are orange spheres and cylinders dubbed “black boxes”? There are several versions.
— Perhaps the name migrated from cybernetics, where this concept denotes an object whose internal structure is unknown. In addition, in the first models of recorders, information was stored on photographic film. In order not to expose the media, the parts of the device were painted black,” Yuri Vasilyevich lists the versions. “But most likely that’s what the journalists called the registrars.” Having seen the recorder covered with soot and removed from its casing, one of the reporters came up with a simple and figurative euphemism for the device.
Voice recorder with magnetic tape.
What is hidden under the titanium shell? There are two types of recorders - parametric and speech. The first ones record readings from all aircraft systems, from speed and altitude to engine pressure and flap position. Now there are more than a thousand parameters in this list. A voice recorder is essentially a tape recorder and records all conversations in the cockpit of an aircraft - both between crew members and with ground services.
Most modern airliners are equipped with digital recorders. They store information on a solid-state drive, or, more simply, a flash card.
“If analog recorders were two different devices, one of which was installed in the rear of the ship, the other in the cockpit, then modern technologies make it possible to write parametric and speech information on one medium,” explains Yuri Vasilyevich. — However, even in this case, two devices are installed on one side: the main one and the backup one.
All civilian ships should soon switch to solid-state recorders - this is required by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO.
But analog recorders will remain in service for at least another five years.
“They record on the thinnest steel wire, with a diameter of only five hundredths of a millimeter, or on magnetic tape,” explains Yuri Popov. — Among the military, the An-24, An-26, Su-25 attack aircraft, and Tu-95 bombers are equipped with such equipment. In civil aviation, such recorders remained on the Tu-134, Tu-154. Therefore, experts from both our institute and MAK have to deal with two types of devices.
Yuri Vasilyevich himself managed to work with both military “black boxes” and civilian ones. For five years he headed the department of parametric and sound information processing at MAK. But, having worked in civilian life, he decided to return to the military institute, where he left in the mid-2000s.
— Yuri Vasilyevich, is the technology for decoding information different between you and MAK?
— By and large, no. But the Aviation Committee experts still have to deal more with solid-state drives.
Where does the receptionist's beard come from?
By the time we learn about another plane crash from the news, a commission has already been formed in the military or civilian department to investigate it. Each incident in the air is assigned a specific code.
— Non-critical equipment failure is indicated by the letters AB. The abbreviation ABC means that the accident is urgent, with human casualties or loss of the aircraft,” Vasily Svintsov explains the terminology used by the military. — The letters AVL opposite the operational task mean that a flying laboratory is being sent to the crash site.
Yuri Popov disassembles one of the first models of “black boxes”.
By the way, only this institute has such a board. Specialists can fly to the crash site (in aviation slang, “to the pit”) at any time of the day or night. But this is not always necessary.
— If the “black boxes” are not damaged, you can obtain data from them at the aviation unit closest to the accident site. They can be deciphered there,” explains Vasily Petrovich.
Drives are delivered to the ERAT Research Center laboratories only with severe damage.
“Look at the records we have to deal with,” Vasily Petrovich shows lumps of wire that look like a washcloth. — We call these skeins a beard. And this is happiness if the film is just tangled and not torn into dozens of segments...
A special case has been developed to transport damaged storage media. But often he is not at the scene of the tragedy. More than once, the most valuable records were delivered to experts in ordinary boxes or travel bags.
But it is the “black boxes” recovered from the seabed that require the most attention.
— The recorder can lie under water for a month. But once you extract a recording from it outside of laboratory conditions, it most likely will no longer be decipherable. Such recorders are delivered to us in containers with the water in which they were found,” explains Vasily Svintsov.
— And how often do you have to restore such records?
— Rarely, but it happened. For example, I was involved in restoring the recorders of a South Korean Boeing 737. On the night of September 1, 1983, this aircraft, flying from New York to Seoul, deviated from its course, violated USSR airspace and was shot down by our interceptor in the Sakhalin area. We looked for recorders at the bottom of the Sea of Japan for quite a long time. Partly because they simply could not imagine what foreign registrars could look like. I remember several times we pulled out ordinary players from under the water... When we finally discovered the recorders, it became clear that the voice information was recorded on an ordinary magnetic tape. We listened to it on the Comet tape recorder. True, in order for the tracks on the American tape to coincide with the tracks on the domestic tape recorder, it was necessary to place blades under the magnetic heads.
Records are “treated” with kerosene and a soldering iron
The data recovery process takes from several days to several months. Moreover, the easiest way to “resurrect” is wire media that has been in fire. With cotton wool soaked in ordinary kerosene, the soot is simply removed from them. But the recording can only be restored if the flame temperature did not exceed 650 degrees.
“Ten degrees above this critical point and the recording will be lost forever.” At this temperature, the wire simply becomes demagnetized,” explains Vasily Petrovich. “We can determine this by eye: if the “cheeks” of the cassette are melted, it means there is nothing left on the recording.
Magnetic tape is even less resistant to high temperatures. Already at 150 degrees the top layer begins to “boil”. Such a record cannot be restored.
— If the wire is torn into several pieces by an impact, then they are first wound onto small special devices. Women do this most often: the work is so intricate that it cannot be accomplished with rough male fingers. Besides, only the fairer sex has the patience... experts note.
Then the pieces of wire begin to be connected - the beginning of one with the end of the previous one.
“We don’t even work with sections shorter than twenty centimeters.” The fact is that 3-4 sounds pronounced by a person fit into this length. Even if we tried to connect such pieces, we still would not catch the meaning of the phrase. The result would be a set of sounds.
Torn magnetic film is “treated” using the same method as tape in household cassettes.
— The break points are simply glued together with tape. But such a film can only be played once. Therefore, we transfer all recordings onto a laboratory cassette. We leave it in the archive as a means of objective control.
Solid state drives are more resistant to mechanical damage. Mainly due to the fact that in addition to general armor they also have a personal shell. In addition, a static system is by definition more reliable. But even they are most often damaged when falling from a great height.
“Information recovery work depends on the nature of the damage,” explains Yuri Popov. — If the board is preserved, it is removed from the drive and installed in another. If the board is damaged, they try to unsolder individual microcircuits and attach them to a new board.
Ultimately, regardless of whether experts are dealing with an analog or digital recorder, the recording ends up in the computer. Using a special program, it is cleared of extraneous noise as much as possible. But it will take several more days, or even weeks, before the transcript of the pilots’ conversations reaches the investigator’s desk.
Vasily Svintsov shows in what condition the wire with recordings of pilots’ conversations sometimes arrives at their laboratory.
“Perfect pitch is not needed. What’s more important is experience...”
It would seem that it could be simpler: listen to the recording and transfer it to paper. But even when transcribing a lecture or interview, sometimes you have to rewind some fragments several times: either the interlocutor will whisper, or the alarm of a car parked nearby will sound. Now imagine the situation in the cockpit a few minutes before the collision with the ground: the emergency siren is blaring, the dispatchers are shouting in a voice that is not their own, the pilots are swearing...
And in this hubbub, experts need to hear every word.
“Let’s conduct an experiment,” the interlocutors suggest. “We’ll let you listen to a few minutes of a recording of a speech from a burning plane.” Then we will compare what you heard with the transcript.
To make it easier, they even gave me a picture of the incident: during the landing approach, the plane touched a snow parapet on the runway. The impact was not strong, but it was enough to pierce the fuel tank. A fire started. But the crew of the ship has not yet noticed the emergency situation. Only ground services saw what was happening.
I heard the navigator’s first words quite clearly: “Altitude three hundred and sixty.” But the very next phrase was drowned in the grinding of the laryngophone - the same sounds are made by a badly scratched record.
- Not understood? And the navigator just announced the altitude: three hundred and fifty,” Vasily Petrovich translated.
Through the grinding I heard a couple more phrases. "What was it?" - asked the pilot. Apparently he felt the blow.
Vasily Petrovich shows me the protocol: the time in it is indicated down to fractions of seconds.
Pilot (P): I don’t understand what’s on their runway?
Flight Director (RP): Fire, fire.
P: I don’t understand...
RP: Turn off the engines, turn off the engines!
P: (inaudible)
RP: Leave the plane, slow down, leave the plane! Carcasses, throw them off...
Seeing what kind of cacophony experts manage to isolate words from, it may seem that people with perfect pitch are working here. They would not work in a laboratory, but in the orchestra pit of the Bolshoi Theater. But, as it turned out, hearing is not the most important thing in such work.
— Knowledge of aviation terminology is much more important. At MAK we even conducted an experiment: we gave the same recording to girls with a musical education and professional pilots to listen to. It’s not hard to imagine that the ladies, although they had perfect pitch, could not decipher almost anything,” recalls Yuri Popov.
But sometimes even experts are powerless. In difficult cases, linguists come to their aid.
“I remember that while deciphering one of the recordings, we could not understand the last words of the pilot. But this is the key point. The recording had to be sent to the Institute of Forensic Science, where some of the best linguists work, recalls Vasily Petrovich. — We waited a month for the results. When the protocol finally came to us, it turned out that the last words of the pilot were obscene language...
— Can’t experts guess from consonance?
- No, you need to hear every word. In some cases, it may be the key to further investigation. If the experts are looking for consonance, each of them needs to be assigned another specialist who would check his colleague’s guesses. Although sometimes this is done: in controversial situations, several specialists listen to the recording at once. Then they choose the option that matches the majority,” says Popov.
Understanding the meaning of what was said is not enough. It is also necessary to accurately determine which crew member owns a particular speech fragment.
— Usually, for this purpose, people who have experience communicating with the crew are invited to the laboratory. Moreover, it is obligatory to use the aircraft intercom. Close relatives and friends will not help here: SPU greatly distorts the voice, says Vasily Svintsov.
But at the moment the emergency situation develops, the emotional intensity of the speech is so high that all its characteristics “float”: the timbre, tonality changes... Sometimes the dispatcher simply does not recognize the pilot’s voice. Plus, one frequency can be used by several aircraft at once. Therefore, SRC ERAT has developed a unique method for identifying “subscribers”.
— To get in touch, you need to press the push-to-talk button—the button that switches from receiving to transmitting. There is a click sound on the air, after which the person can speak. If this click is deciphered on an oscilloscope, it turns out that the curve of each device is unique - like a person’s fingerprints. Based on the tangent curve, we can accurately determine who owns a given speech fragment,” explains Vasily Svintsov. — By the way, we transferred this technology to IAC.
— Which recorder is easier to decipher: parametric or speech?
“Of course, parametric,” says Yuri Popov, who has worked with two types of devices, confidently. — The expert just needs to transfer the information to the computer, and the program will do everything for you. The data is ultimately released in the form of graphs. Speech identification cannot yet be done without a person. But working with speech recorders is also difficult from a psychological point of view. Not everyone can hear the last words of pilots a hundred times. It takes some getting used to.
— What does the crew usually say a second before hitting the ground? It is believed that they turn to family, loved ones...
- This is all fiction. Usually they fight. Rough...
How does a black box work?
The cause of the disaster, it is noted, was.
Rostov-on-Don, 2016
The disaster, in which 62 people died - 55 passengers and 7 crew members - occurred on the night of March 19, 2016. The plane, trying to re-land after a missed approach, went into a tailspin. The reason for the energetic decline of the Flydubai Boeing was the simultaneous pushback of the steering wheel and the deflection of the stabilizer into a dive. The pilots made the decision to abandon the landing and go for another circle at an altitude of 220 m. At that time, the plane was controlled in manual mode.
Vnukovo, 2014
On October 20, 2014, at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, during takeoff, the plane collided with an airfield snowplow, resulting in the destruction and fire of the aircraft. There were four French citizens on board, including the chief executive officer of the major oil and gas company Total, Christophe de Margerie. They all died. The plane crash was the result of a number of violations, the IAC said.
Yaroslavl, 2011
The Yak-42D airliner was making an international charter flight from Yaroslavl to Minsk (Belarus). On board was the Lokomotiv hockey club. In simple weather conditions, the plane began its takeoff run along the runway of the Yaroslavl Tunoshna airport. During the takeoff run, the plane rolled off the runway and took off from the ground 400 meters beyond the end of the runway. The flight lasted several seconds: the airliner gained a height of no more than 5–6 meters, then collided with a radio beacon, crashed into the ground and exploded. 44 people died. The direct cause of the disaster was identified as one of the pilots pressing the brake pedals during the take-off run of the plane.
Perm, 2008
On September 14, 2008, the Boeing 737-505 airliner was making a passenger flight on the Moscow-Perm route, but during landing, before reaching approximately 11 kilometers from the Perm Bolshoye Savino airport, the airliner crashed to the ground and was completely destroyed. All 88 people on board were killed. The causes of the disaster were “the lack of interaction among the crew and the shortcomings of the entire system of its preparation for flights.”
Donetsk, 2006
On August 22, 2006, the Tu-154M airliner of the Russian Pulkovo airline was performing a scheduled passenger flight from Anapa to St. Petersburg. While trying to fly around a thunderstorm in the Donetsk region, the plane climbed to a height not provided for in the aircraft operating manual. Next, the airliner found itself in a situation that pilots call “catch-up”: a rising flow of warm air lifted the nose of the plane, but the instruments did not show any change in speed. The air flow, like an elevator, threw the Tu-154 800 meters in seconds. The engines were unable to support the plane at such an altitude, and it lost speed and fell into a flat tailspin. All 160 passengers and 10 crew members on board died in the disaster.
Irkutsk, 2001
On July 4, 2001, at night, a Tu-154 airliner of the Vladivostok-Avia airline crashed on approach to Irkutsk. The flight was traveling from Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok with an intermediate stop in Irkutsk. The pilots were performing a turn and approach maneuver when the airliner suddenly turned 180 degrees and the plane began to fall. The cause of the accident was that during the landing approach the crew was unable to maintain the established altitude of 850 meters. To correct the error, the co-pilot pulled the steering wheel towards himself. The commander’s incorrect actions only aggravated this situation; as a result, the plane completely lost control and crashed. 144 people died.
