Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan “does not look like” bird strike as Russia suggested, experts say
Speculation grew on Friday that the Russian military may have played a role in the incident. Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash Christmas Day incident in Kazakhstan kills 38 people and injures 29 survivors, experts say Skeptical about Moscow’s proposals The main culprit is bird strikes.
Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190 aircraft, flew from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to the city of Grozny in the North Caucasus region of Russia on Wednesday. It was diverted two days later for unknown reasons. According to reports, at some point during the flight, the aircraft’s GPS tracking was disrupted, causing the flight path to deviate significantly.
The plane crashed while trying to reach another airport in Aktau, western Kazakhstan, after flying east over the Caspian Sea. The plane crashed into a fireball just about two miles from Aktau Airport.
Murat Usubari/Anadolu/Getty
Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Russia all launched investigations into the cause of the crash, but two days later Russia faced the most acute questions. The Kremlin urged people not to jump to conclusions and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who has forged closer ties between Azerbaijan and Russia during two decades in power, also said it was too early to speculate.
“The information I received is that due to worsening weather conditions, the plane changed its route between Baku and Grozny and flew to Aktau Airport, where it crashed while landing,” he said.
But a U.S. official told CBS News there were early indications that Russian air defenses may have hit the plane in an area where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been attacking with drones and rockets for months. The official, who spoke to CBS News on condition of anonymity, said that if proven true, it would further highlight Russia’s reckless behavior in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Independent aviation experts also cast doubt on the bird strike theory, pointing to damage to the plane’s fuselage as evidence of a possible more sinister explanation.
Issa Tarebayev/AFP/Getty
“It certainly didn’t look like a flock of birds,” said Robert Sumwalt, a CBS News aviation safety analyst and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
“Birds do not fly at the altitude where the initial damage to this aircraft occurred,” Sumwalt added.
Instead, the damage had the signature of airborne weapons shrapnel, and “the most likely hypothesis is that it was hit by an anti-aircraft missile,” British military veteran and security analyst Justin Crump told CBS News partner network BBC News – almost certainly Russian.”
Some survivors of the crash said they heard explosions.
“The Ukrainian drone was active at the time, which is consistent with everything we saw in the pilot’s communications with air traffic control,” Crump told the BBC.
Azamat Sarsenbayev/Reuters
Ukraine has Heavy reliance on explosive drones Last year, Russia regularly shot down these weapons with its air defense systems to hit Russian military and infrastructure targets in its larger neighbor’s western territories.
For many observers, the circumstances of the Azerbaijan Airlines crash and the damage to the wreckage were evocative of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down In 2014, the passenger plane was hit by a missile fired by Russian-backed forces over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
Among those desperate for answers in Kazakhstan’s latest disaster are survivors of the crash, including a man who said from a hospital bed that he was sitting next to his wife when the plane went down.
“I haven’t seen my wife since,” he said.
Investigators have recovered two so-called “black boxes” – flight data and a cockpit voice recorder – from the crash site. Experts from Brazil, where the plane was built, are due to arrive in Kazakhstan on Friday to help retrieve and analyze the information they have provided.
The Ukrainian government on Friday called Russia responsible for the crash and Azerbaijan Airlines reportedly stopped scheduled flights to seven Russian cities as a formal investigation intensified.
