What are the versions of the Tu 154 plane crash? “Is it perhaps collective insanity?”

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.

Airplane 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In the mid-2000s, the aircraft began to be gradually withdrawn from service.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. Economic crisis 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 In 2008, the entire Tu-154 fleet was withdrawn by S7, followed by Rossiya and Aeroflot the following year.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. According to the 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 removal, at a high take-off weight, in conditions of a high-mountain airfield and high air temperatures. 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 design features airplane. 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 a regular flight on the route Karshi - Ufa - Leningrad, 46 minutes after takeoff at an altitude of 11 thousand 600 m, 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 with all their might to keep the plane in the air, but the uncontrollable airliner crashed to the ground near the village of Glubokoye, Kamensky district, Rostov region, and was completely destroyed. 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

The presidential airliner Tu-154M of the Polish Air Force was flying 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.

Occur almost every year since the start of flights of this type of aircraft. From 1973 to 2011, there were only a few years during which not a single incident related to the Tu-154 occurred.

In total, 72 Tu-154 aircraft were lost in accidents and disasters. The largest Tu-154 crash(and all Soviet aviation) occurred on July 10, 1985 near Uchkuduk. The overloaded plane went into a tailspin due to the fault of the crew. There were 200 people on board, all of them died.

In general, despite the fact that, according to some pilots, the Tu-154 is too complicated for a mass-produced passenger airliner and requires highly qualified flight and ground personnel, this airliner has proven itself to be a completely reliable and safe aircraft. Moreover, Tu-154 plane crashes are not always due to the fault of technology.

Of course, airliner problems do happen, but more often they occur on aircraft that are operated beyond normal limits and do not receive adequate maintenance. In addition, errors of the crew, dispatchers, or other circumstances often lead to disasters. For example, in 2011, a civilian flight flying over the Black Sea was mistakenly shot down by a Ukrainian air defense missile during an exercise...

Of the latest disasters, it is worth noting Polish Tu-154, crashed near Smolensk in 2010. On that plane is the President of Poland with his wife, as well as many high-ranking officials. They all died.

But more favorable outcomes also happen. In 2010, a plane with failed engines was able to land safely at an abandoned airfield in Izhma. This legendary Alrosa company saved the lives of 81 people.

The table below provides a short list of all Tu-154 plane crashes compiled by Wikipedia.

Important: There were no reports that the controller monitoring the radar received reports of problems on board.

In the very first hours, a version appeared on social networks that it was a terrorist attack, since a plane with three engines that has passed all diagnostic procedures, especially if it is a TU-154, which is flown by top-class pilots in excellent weather, does not suddenly disappear on its own from radars. If anyone is interested, google TU-154 and look at the list of incidents.

At the same time, the official media began to emphasize that this was anything, even a meteorite, but not a terrorist attack, on the sole grounds that the special services could not allow this. That is, the FSB could not “screw up”, because the FSB cannot “screw up”.

Later, information came about the wreckage, the radius of which clearly indicated that the plane was destroyed in the air, but even then the media quickly attributed everything to powerful currents that allegedly carried the wreckage away. This version is easily verified by divers, since parts capable of floating could actually be carried away by the current, but heavy ones, be they seats, engines or chassis, in the event of destruction on the water, as the media are trying to prove, they will be nearby, and in the event of a terrorist attack they will be at a decent distance. from a friend at the bottom.

At the same time, we are informed that the passengers were found wearing vests, that is, they had enough time for the commander to announce that a problem had been discovered, take out the vests, unfold them and put them on, being in a sleepy state, because they were flying out of Moscow at night. And this time was not enough for the pilots to press the switch and thereby report a problem?

Is this possible? I think no.

Added December 27. The version with vests was refuted; the big question is where it came from, being untenable based on official data.

The media picked up a new version that it was an overload, but again, it was officially reported that the plane was only refueled and even food was not delivered on board, where did the overload come from? There were 92 people on board, the plane was designed for 180 passengers, and how could the plane fly from Moscow to Adler with the same load?

Another version that someone threw into the media is that low-quality fuel caused three engines to fail at once. The version is again weak. I’m not a pilot, but as a motorist I know that if you add “donkey urine” to half a normal tank, then complete engine failure will not occur. The range of the TU-154B-2 when fully loaded is 2780 km. The distance from Moscow to Sochi is approximately 1300 km, and it is very doubtful that in Moscow the plane was half fueled, it simply does not make any sense, charters can save money this way, but not the military.

In general, the version with fuel both appeared and disappeared.

IN this moment The priority version is the ingress of foreign objects into the engine. But one must assume that they will also abandon it for the simple reason that the TU-154 has three engines.

Another strange thing. It was officially reported that refueling was initially planned in Mozdok, but due to weather conditions the plane was redirected to Sochi. However, if you look up the weather archive, it was clear in Mozdok on December 25 at night, about -11C and practically calm.

It should be taken into account that with the range of this modification of the TU-154 being 2780 km, the declared route to Syria through the Caspian Sea, Iran and Iraq, flying around Georgia and Azerbaijan, is about 2500 km, which is actually at the limit of the range, while the route from Mozdok 2100.

Everyone settled on the possibility that they could not have planted a bomb during refueling, perhaps, but where is the guarantee that it was not planted in Moscow? The idea is also being actively promoted that refueling was planned in Mozdok, and not in Adler, and no one could have known that the plane would be redirected, but was there any point in redirecting it?

More more interesting information came from Kommersant, they say there was a witness who saw the plane hit the water with its tail. At 5:30 a.m., at sunrise at 8 a.m., that is, in complete darkness, a witness saw a plane 4-6 km from the coast touching the water with its tail... And this is taking into account that visibility to the horizon is about 5 km...

With all these oddities, as well as the reaction of the media and officials, who from the first hours, even before the discovery of the wreckage, began to repeat the mantra “this is not a terrorist attack” and invent versions on the fly that do not stand up to any criticism, for me personally, based on all this data - this is a terrorist attack and until the opposite is proven, there can be no other version.

According to the official version of the Tu-154 crash in Sochi on December 25, 2016, an orangutan turned out to be at the controls of the plane instead of a human, and began to jerk the control sticks absurdly, which led to the tragedy.

If we draw a parallel with driving a car, it would look like this: the driver got behind the wheel, drove off, and drove into a snowdrift.

I backed out and crushed three cars nearby. Then he drove forward and crashed as hard as he could into a garbage container, which is where the trip ended.

Conclusion: either the driver was dead drunk - or something happened to the car.

But the Tu-154 recorders showed that the plane was fully operational. And it also doesn’t work to assume that the pilot began to take off in a dead state in front of other crew members, who were not suicides.

And his voice on the recorder is absolutely sober.

However, the plane crashed, allegedly as a result of inexplicable actions by the crew. Or is there still an explanation - but the military leadership is desperately hiding it?

Cunning journalists discovered that the plane may have been heavily overloaded - hence all the consequences. Moreover, it was reloaded not at Sochi’s Adler airport, where it made an intermediate landing, but at the Chkalovsky military airfield near Moscow, from where it took off.

The weight of excess cargo is more than 10 tons.

And 2 seconds after lifting off the ground, the ship’s commander, Roman Volkov, pulled the steering wheel towards himself in order to increase the take-off angle. The fact is that the take-off and landing trajectories are strictly defined at each airfield: landing takes place on a flatter path, take-off - on a steeper one. This is necessary to separate the planes taking off and landing in height - without which they would constantly be in danger of colliding in the air.

But an increase in the angle of climb led to a drop in speed - the aircraft was too heavy and refused to perform this maneuver. Then the pilot, probably already realizing that he had been given some kind of pig in the form of an extra load, gave the helm away from himself in order to stop the climb and thereby gain speed.

This happened at an altitude of 200 meters - and if the plane had remained at this level, even in violation of all the rules, the tragedy might not have happened.

But Volkov piloted the car outside its permissible modes - something no one had done before him, since overloaded flights are strictly prohibited. And how the plane behaved under these conditions is difficult to imagine. In addition, it is possible that that extra cargo, being poorly secured, also disrupted the alignment of the aircraft during takeoff.

As a result, there was a slight panic in the cabin. Pilots began retracting the flaps ahead of schedule to reduce air resistance and thereby gain speed faster.

Here a dangerous approach to the water began, over which the take-off line was. The speed was already decent - 500 km/h, Volkov suddenly took the helm to raise the plane, at the same time starting a turn - apparently, he decided to return to the airfield.

Then the irreparable happened: the plane, in response to the pilot’s actions, did not go up, but crashed into the water, scattering into fragments from the collision with it...

One might also ask: how did an overloaded plane manage to get off the runway? The answer is simple: there is a so-called screen effect, which significantly increases the lifting force of the wings at a height of up to 15 meters from the ground. By the way, the concept of ekranoplanes is based on it - half-planes, half-ships, flying within this 15-meter altitude with a much larger load on board than those of equal power…

aircraft

Well, now the most important questions.

First: what kind of cargo was placed in the belly of this Tu - and by whom? It is clear that these were not light drugs from Dr. Lisa, who was on this flight, and not an armored personnel carrier:

a passenger plane does not have a wide port for entry of any equipment. This cargo was apparently heavy and compact enough to enter through the cargo hatch. And what exactly - you can guess anything here: boxes of vodka, shells, gold bars, Sobyanin tiles... And why they decided to send it not by cargo, but by passenger flight - there could also be any reasons. From sloppiness

for the failure to send combat cargo, which they decided to cover up gradually - to the most criminal schemes for the export of precious metals or other contraband.

Another question: did the pilots know about this left cargo? For sure! This is not a needle in a haystack - but a whole haystack that cannot be hidden from view.

But what exactly was there and what the true weight of it was - the pilots may not have known. This is an army, where the order of the highest rank is higher than all instructions; and most likely that order was accompanied by some other generous promise - with a hint of all sorts of intrigues in case of refusal. Under the influence of such an explosive mixture, a lot of malfeasance is committed today - when a forced person is faced with a choice: either make decent money - or be left without work and without pants. And the famous Russian, perhaps, at the same time, as they say, has not been canceled! Who ordered? There can also be a big spread here: from some

In short, in Chkalovsky the plane is overloaded, but this overload is compensated for by incomplete refueling - and in Adler the tanks are already filled to capacity. Obviously, the calculation was to fly to Syrian Khmeimim (destination) and back on our own fuel.

And the fact that the ship’s commander agreed in Adler to these 35.6 tons of fuel speaks in favor of the fact that he still did not know the real magnitude of the overload.

If he were to fly alone, he could still indulge in the dashing daring that Chkalov himself initiated in our aviation. But behind Volkov there was his own crew of 7 people, and another 84 passengers, including artists from the Alexandrov ensemble!

The fact that the Ministry of Defense in this matter is not just obfuscating, but completely hiding the truth is evidenced by such facts.

1. Shoigu’s version of “a violation of the commander’s spatial orientation (situational awareness), which led to erroneous actions with the aircraft controls” does not stand up to criticism. For any pilot, not only with 4,000 hours of flight time, like Volkov, but also with ten times less, takeoff is the simplest action that does not require any special skills. For example, landing in difficult weather conditions is a completely different matter. The crash during the landing of the same Tu-154 from the Polish delegation near Smolensk is a typical example of the lack of skill and experience of the pilot. But no one has ever crashed while taking off on a working plane. 2. The decoding of the recorders probably already in the first days after the tragedy gave the full breakdown of what happened. An analogy with the same Polish case in 2010 is appropriate here: then, already on the 5th day, the IAC (Interstate Aviation Committee) issued a comprehensive version of the incident, which was fully confirmed later. The IAC has been stubbornly silent about the Adler disaster for 6 months now.

On his website, where detailed analyzes of all flight accidents are published, there are only two on the subject of Adler’s

short messages

3. Naturally, the Minister of Defense in the very first hours, if not minutes after the disaster, found out what cargo was on board the crashed Tu. And the incredibly long search for the wreckage of the plane, which added absolutely nothing to the information from the recorders, suggests that they were looking for that same secret cargo. And not at all the truth, which was clear to the military immediately.

Well, one more question: why do the military, led by their minister, hide this truth so much? And from whom – from Putin himself or from the people?

Well, I very much doubt that they would hide her from Putin: he doesn’t look like a person who can be fooled around his finger. This means they are hiding from the people.

This means that this truth is such that it somehow terribly undermines the prestige of our military.

That is, either some lieutenant colonel, a complete idiot, loaded something into a passenger plane that should not have been on it. And then a shadow over our entire army, in which there are such idiots on horseback that they can ruin as much as the backbone of Alexandrov’s ensemble with their idiocy.

Or a colonel general, who is at the very top, is involved - and then there is also shame and disgrace: it turns out that after the change from Serdyukov to Shoigu, our army was not cleansed of general outrage?

And the very last thing. Remember, when we watched the film “Chapaev” as children, many of us shouted in the audience: “Chapay, run!” I just as spontaneously want today, when everything has practically become clear with the Adler tragedy, to shout to the pilot Volkov: “Don’t take this cargo! And if you take it, don’t fly higher than 200 meters above the sea!”

After all, if you look at the calm mind, which was not praised by the pilot caught in a storm of circumstances, he had a chance of salvation. Namely: when the plane is overloaded, do not even try to follow the instructions, which oblige you to rise to such and such a height at such and such a distance from the airfield. Violate it to hell, get a reprimand for it, even dismissal - but thereby save your life and the lives of others. That is, fly at a minimum altitude, burning off fuel, and when the weight of the plane drops in an hour and a half, begin lifting. Another thing that comes to mind again is that if you decide to return to Adler, make a turn not by a standard turn with a side roll, which is what dumped the plane into the sea, but by the so-called “pancake”. That is, with one rudder - when the plane remains in horizontal

But even this chance, which could save this plane, in the future would still be illusory and deadly. Let’s say Volkov managed to get out of the disastrous situation set by the organizers of his flight. Then next time he or his colleague would be given not 10, but 15 extra tons of some “unspecified” cargo: after all, appetites grow as their satisfaction.

And the tragedy would have happened anyway - not in this case, then in the next, if its causes remained the same.

God grant that as a result of this catastrophe, someone in our armed forces will give someone a hard time, putting an end to the outrages that led to the inevitable outcome.