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An Embraer E190AR aircraft of Azerbaijan Airlines crashed whilst attempting an approach to Aktau airport in Kazakhstan on December 25th.
The aircraft had attempted to land at Grozny in Chechnya/Russia and missed the approach, deciding to divert to an alternate airport, when it declared an emergency citing a possible bird strike and loss of its control systems. The crew elected to divert to Aktau rather than the original alternate due to weather being more favourable there.
Video footage of the aircraft attempting to land at Aktau, shows the aircraft in oscillating flight – a phugoid undulation – and data collected from aviation systems reveal wildly fluctuating speed and altitude. Eventually the aircraft is seen, undercarriage down, in a more stable attitude before pitching nose down and dropping a wing near the ground, which resulted in a crash and fire.
The aircraft broke in two, with the rear part of the fuselage unburnt and semi inverted but containing surviving passengers and cabin crew. Tragically those in the front section perished and the crash. Subsequent inspection of the video reveals that the aircraft controls were not functioning and that landing flaps were not deployed. It then became clear that the crew were trying to control the aircraft using engine thrust. By increasing thrust on, say, the right engine, the aircraft will roll to the left and vice versa.
By using asymmetric thrust in this way, a very crude degree of control is possible but it is nowhere near enough to be accurate and a large degree of good fortune is required to land in these circumstances, as well as a very cool head. The pilots in this case made a skilful attempt at a landing in very difficult circumstances and should be commended for saving at least some of the occupants but sadly, not themselves.
In 1989 there was a crashlanding in the US airport of Sioux City when a United Airlines DC10, flight 232, suffered loss of all hydraulic controls following an engine explosion and the crew used this method to attempt a landing. They and 185 passengers survived but 111 did not.
In the case of the Azerbaijan aircraft however, there is a very different reason for the loss of the hydraulic controls. It was targeted by an anti-aircraft missile and effectively shot down by Russian air defence. It is believed that a missile called Pantsir may have been involved as they have been deployed in the area. Also some of the puncture holes in the aircraft seem to match the cube like shrapnel that the Pantsir uses, when it detonates close to the target. It would seem pretty likely that this is another civilian airliner shot down by Russian missiles if we recall Malaysian MH17, which was hit by a Russian BUK missile about 10 years ago. This was also linked to Russia’s illegal wars in Ukraine.
There has also been some discussion of GPS jamming in the area, which there has been for some while as Russia tries to limit the capability of Ukrainian drones. The crew were affected by this and it will have just made their job a bit harder by limiting approach systems that were available to them but in itself would not have caused a crash.
It is questionable if scheduled passenger aircraft should be operating in or near active war zones and this type of mistake is not limited to Russia either, as both Iranian and US defences have wrongly targeted and destroyed airliners before. In Iran in January 2020 Ukraine International Boeing 737-800 was destroyed by a missile shortly after take-off from Tehran killing all 176 occupants and in July 1988 the US Navy shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300, which was on a scheduled route.
All these incidents were probably unintentional targeting of civilian aircraft mistaken for hostile threats but it is a growing concern as civilian aviation continues to operate around areas of conflict. With all the examples and reasons for crashes that I have provided in my book, being shot down is not one of them as it was once unthinkable or at least vanishingly rare. Perhaps it is now another category of crash that needs to be considered more urgently.