Investigation led by the Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) is on. They found FDR, CVR on a site shortly after the accident of September 14th.. There was a report of these recording devices been badly damaged as a result of severe impact the aircraft suffered after ‘falling from the sky‘. Yeah, that’s how some witnesses, happened to be awake at this wee hour commented on sudden appearance of low flying aircraft over the city’s neighborhood near which the fated plane collided with the ground.
However, a few days ago there’s been a brief statement issued by MAK where they advised the FDR and CVR information was successfully retrieved from the devices, and they are having it read, and decoded. Summarizing all the data gathered during investigation as for now, authorities are quite certain already, there was NO explosion on the aircraft (although, initially this version was hotly debated in Russian media).
They found that both plane’s engines were spinning well, until the very moment of impact. This fact has also sufficiently downplayed a ‘theory of fatal engine fire‘ actively circulated in the media. Perhaps, for some period of time this ‘fire theory’ had much ‘fuel’ coming from witnesses’ interviews broadcasted on many Russian TV channels. Giving account of the incident most people were talking of the plane they happened to be seeing as of a ‘fireball comet falling from the sky‘. Some pilots had skeptically commented on this in the Internet forums, saying, “you should see approaching aircraft breaking through low overcast with the landing lights on“. Interestingly enough, a few TV channels were running a computer animation for a while, showing a plane (it was supposed to be representing an ‘accident re-enactment’) spiraling down with the LEFT engine on fire, whereas ‘most’ witnesses stated about the Boeing’s RIGHT engine being caught on fire. MAK has made it clear as well, that there was NO fire on board..
Representatives of the aircraft manufacturer (Boeing) are participating in the investigation too.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
It’s awful to realize that it was really ‘human factor’.That people who’ve heard the record of CVR were shocked.I know some information but….I can’t straightforward talk about it because of absence of official result/document,but to sum up CRM is a great thing.Our pilots that had flown Tupolev,Ilushin,Antonov aicraft before Boeing or Airbus often don’t aware of necessity of CRM,so as ‘young’ pilots due to lack of normal course of CRM.It’s a big problem that nobody tries to solve…So we’ve got such a bad result!
I wish it would be solved!
Cheers,
A
November 11th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Alexey,
We’ll talk about ‘human factors’ - generally, and regarding this incident - specifically. But as you have pointed - indeed, there’s a big ‘cultural and generational clash’ that can be observed on some lines in Russian aviation where the tremendous changes are now happening, and the ‘invasion’ (as some folks put it) of the Western built equipment into the country has certainly stimulated a very ‘acute state’ of this clash..
See, what I’m saying?