The Azerbaijan Airlines crashed landed close to the eastern coastline of the Caspian Sea on Christmas Day with at least 38 people reportedly having been killed in the disaster
The horrifying final moments of a doomed Azerbaijan Airlines flight that crash landed in Kazakhstan had been laid bare in desperate calls to air traffic controls.
Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer E190AR crashed in flames in Aktau on the western coastline of the Caspian Sea on Christmas Day leaving at least 38 people dead. The flight from Baku, Azerbaijan , was bound for Grozny in the southern Chechen region of Russia. Harrowing calls from the crew to air traffic control shed further light on the flight’s final moments. As the pilot struggled to control the plane, air traffic control was notified about their perilous situation.
At 8:12am local time, the crew reported “both GPS lost” and that it sought help with “vectoring” to head back to Baku. Just four minutes later, one of the pilots said: “We have control failure, bird strike in the cockpit. Bird strike in the cockpit (inaudible)… Ground control replied: “AXY8243 I understand you, what kind of help do you need?” At 8:19am, the pilot later said: “I can’t maintain 150, we have high pressure in the cabin.”
Ground control reply: “AXY8243 understood you.” One minute later, at 8:20, the flight’s scheduled arrival time, the pilot says: “Left 360, my plane is losing control.” A leaked transcript at 8:21am said the flight was attempting to head toward Makhachkala, a Russian airport on the Caspian Sea. At 8:22, the crew report: “Now the hydraulics have failed.”
Just two minutes later, the pilot appeared to deny he had declared a “distress” on board and told ground control: “The board [plane] is in order.” The air traffic controller then could not properly hear the crew. “You are very hard to hear…. tell me your altitude.”
The plane then disappeared from radar for 37 minutes before it reappeared as it sought to land in Aktau. Following the crash, strange “bullet hole” marks were found on the fuselage which in turn raised new questions about the disaster.
Among the questions yet to be answered is why the flight headed toward Aktau for 275 miles where it would eventually crash. An official version was that the aircraft hit a flock of birds. Later there were reports of an “explosion” of an oxygen tank supply to the cockpit in the event of depressurisation. It is still unconfirmed what caused the “explosion.”
The supposed sudden depressurisation of the cylinder caused significant damage to the hull and its “scattering into fragments,” according to reports. One survivor said: “There was an explosion – I wouldn’t say it was inside the plane.
“Where I was sitting, the skin next to me flew off. One video purports to show a life jacket damaged by ‘shrapnel’ inside the plane. Damage to the cabin is seen on earlier footage. Video taken during the flight of the Azerbaijani Airlines flight shows that part of the plane’s wing is holed. At the same time, oxygen masks have already fallen out in the cabin.”
