The number of plane crashes in Russia in 2021 broke the world record: the reasons for the sad statistics

During incomplete 2021, there were 31 plane crashes in Russia, which became the world record for the number of accidents. More than a hundred people were killed in an emergency with planes. Why Russian pilots are increasingly getting into accidents and why planes of Russian companies threaten Washington with catastrophe, reports Siberia.Realities

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For incomplete 2021, 31 disasters were recorded in Russia, in 24 of which people died.

Here are just a few: in March, as a result of an emergency with a Tu-22M3 bomber in the Kaluga region, three military men died, in June, 26 people became victims of the An-100B-28 plane crash in Kamchatka - all the pilots and passengers on board, and in August extinguishing a forest fire, the Be-200, which belonged to the Navy, claimed the lives of eight people.

In August, an accident near Khabarovsk cost the lives of six more people, employees of Flight Checks and Systems JSC. In November, the crash of a DOSAAF-owned L-410 aircraft in Tatarstan resulted in the death of sixteen people and six more were injured. A detailed chronicle of these incidents can be found in the special telegram channel Aviaincident.

On December 2, an Airbus A321 of S7 Airlines, which took off from Magadan to Novosibirsk, made an emergency landing in Irkutsk due to icing, presumably because Magadan airport employees used, instead of a special mixture, a cheaper automobile “anti-freeze” based on ethyl alcohol, which evaporated during takeoff.

On December 9, the right landing gear of the Kamchatka Yak-40 was destroyed, and on the same day, the L-410, owned by JSC Kamchatka Aviation Enterprise, rolled off the runway during takeoff and collided with a snow parapet.
A Nordwind Boeing 737, which took off from Moscow to Krasnodar, had to make an emergency landing at Sheremetyevo due to a depressurization signal triggered.

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According to experts, the reason for such depressing statistics is that responsible officials do not pay due attention to the problem of aviation security, airlines are not interested in an impartial and thorough investigation of air incidents, and the Russian aviation industry itself, under an incompetent leadership, has found itself in a deep crisis in recent years.

“Passengers left without masks would be corpses”

“At first everything was as usual, we took off safely, began to gain altitude, but after about 20 minutes the lights suddenly went out, and the loudspeaker announced “Emergency descent,” says Tatyana Bocharova, a lawyer from Moscow and a passenger on the Moscow-Krasnodar flight, who flew on December 11 to the capital of Kuban on board the Nordwind company. “We were forbidden to walk; portholes, curtains - open, the flight attendants sat down in their seats, it was very scary, and it was not clear what was happening, no one said anything, either we were falling, or we would live. When we began to sharply descend, many in the cabin began to panic, the man who was sitting in the chair in front of me began to pray, someone felt bad with their heart, and my throat became so dry that it became difficult to even breathe. And most importantly, when the masks fell out, not everyone lost them. There was instructions before the flight - you need to put it on. But for me, for example, the hatch above the seat from which the mask is taken out simply did not open. I manually tried to do it myself, with my hands, but I still couldn’t get the mask out,” she says.

The alarm at Sheremetyevo that day turned out to be false, the airport continued to work as usual, however, in the wake of the incident, the Moscow Interregional Transport Prosecutor's Office still promised to conduct an inspection. According to experts, the tragedy did not happen then by pure chance.

“If there had been a real depressurization at a flight level of 10 kilometers, then all the passengers left without masks would have been corpses, they would have simply died,” says Vadim Lukashevich, a well-known aviation expert and former designer of the Sukhoi Design Bureau.

He confirms that the number of incidents in Russian aviation has indeed increased significantly in recent years.

“The existing gradation suggests dividing them into “aviation accidents” - those that did not result in human casualties, and “catastrophes” accompanied by the death of people or damage to equipment,” recalls Lukashevich. And he emphasizes that even though the recent false depressurization of the cabin at Sheremetyevo is just an “incident,” each such incident under certain conditions can become a real disaster.

According to a former designer of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, the aircraft in question had been flying for 20 years at the time of the emergency. Since 2003, it has changed several owners, and is now actually leased by the Magadan carrier IKAR, which operates flights for Nordwind under a corresponding agreement.

“Almost all Russian companies, except Aeroflot, now have mostly old planes, especially regional carriers,” says Lukashevich. – Small companies, due to lack of money, are forced to buy used cars from Aeroflot or lease them. Some time ago, a law was introduced into the Duma that would have limited the service life to 15 years, but it would have killed the industry, and the project was then justifiably abandoned.”

He is sure that the reason for the situation is not just wear and tear of equipment: for Boeing, 20 years is not a long time, provided that it is properly operated and repaired in a timely manner. The point is the systemic crisis that has engulfed Russian aviation in recent years.

“We are dealing with an obvious surge in statistics. As a rule, there is a certain factor that influences the increase in the number of accidents: poor training of pilots, obsolescence of the technical base - and in this case we can take measures: develop a training plan, strengthen technical control. But now there is no such single factor, says the expert. – This is a systemic crisis, which manifests itself not in one dominant factor, but everywhere at once: the level of pilots, the level of ground services, and the technical condition. Pilots have this slang expression “Panama”, this is when disasters happen in sequence, one after another, but they cannot be explained in any way, now our entire industry is facing “Panama”.

"Epidemic of Incompetence"

“Such a dramatic change in the statistical indicators of the number of aviation incidents, including disasters, cannot be ignored,” says Oleg Panteleev, head of the analytical service of the AviaPort agency. “We can state that we are faced with a certain trend that we cannot yet explain by a relatively small number of specific factors.”

Lukashevich formulates much more sharply: “During the war, a similar critical situation arose with the accident rate of Il-2 attack aircraft. Most of them simply did not reach the front. They were lifted into the air after acceptance, but during the flight they crashed. As a result, we had to completely stop the supply of aircraft to the active front,” he says. – They were all produced at the same factory. For a long time, designers struggled with the question: what is the problem? The NKVD immediately declared that this was “sabotage.” But the truth turned out to be much simpler: it turned out that the machines were assembled by 12-year-old children, who, out of fatigue, mechanically confused small screws, and ended up screwing them in the wrong place, so that the machines simply fell apart in the air.”

“Now something similar is happening, with the only difference that this time we are not dealing with “cogs”, but with an epidemic of managerial incompetence and a nationwide collapse of the aircraft safety system, which is reflected in the accident rate statistics.” , says the expert.

"One of five"

As an example of the tragedy that led to managerial mistakes, Lukashevich recalls the emergency that occurred at Sheremetyevo in May 2019, when the Sukhoi Superjet (SSJ 100) caught fire there. According to him, it soon became clear that there are not enough simulators for these aircraft in Russia that can simulate the transition of the vessel to manual control mode, the so-called Direct Mode. That is, the pilots who flew on these machines were simply not taught how to use this tool in case of an emergency.

“Then the pilot of the ship, Denis Evdokimov, lost control after lightning hit the plane and went into direct mode; as a result, the landing turned out to be hard and a fire broke out on the ground, a fire in which 41 people died,” the president recalls the details of this story. Interregional Union "Sheremetyevo Union of Flight Personnel" (SHPLS) Igor Deldyuzhov, himself a former pilot, who wrote a lot about that tragedy in his time. – Every six months, all pilots undergo retraining on simulators: four hours of “refresh”, this is something like training, and four hours of “check”, that is, a check. Over the course of three years, the pilot passes on the simulator almost all types of failures possible on the particular machine he is flying. The list of emergency situations that are practiced on the simulator includes both standard engine failure, hydraulic system failure, landing gear failure, and those specific to a particular model.”

According to Delduzhov, if at some point a new accident occurs, the commission finds out its causes and includes a new item in the simulator program: one that concerns the newly identified emergency situation. That is, the list of situations that are practiced for pilots of a specific model on a simulator is constantly updated.

“In the entire history of Superjet flights, there were 8 cases of switching to Direct Mode, five of them on Aeroflot aircraft, in all five cases there were incorrect movements of Aeroflot pilots, that is, they simply did not know how to fly in this mode, but four cases ended well, lucky, but the fifth did not,” he says. “The person who approved the company’s training program and caused the accident ended up being promoted, now he works as deputy head of the minister, and the pilot was put on trial.”

Threat to Washington

The verdict in the Evdokimov case has not yet been passed. In May 2021, after the second change of the composition of the court, it again went to the stage of preliminary hearings. And when the issue will be considered on its merits, it is not yet clear. But the proper conclusions from the tragedy, it seems, were never made.

“Industry leaders do not understand what flight safety is; Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev is convinced that planes fly on their own, and pilots just sit in white shirts and “no way” receive a “huge salary,” says Igor Deldyuzhov.

According to him, even when Savelyev was the head of Aeroflot, the company began to lay off pilots, so that on long-distance flights, instead of the three crew members required by the rules, there were only two pilots left in the cockpit.

“First, the third pilot was removed from flights to Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk; then to Shanghai, Guangzhou, now people fly to New York together! The flight lasts more than ten and a half hours, this is an extreme degree of fatigue. How will it all end? This will end with one of the Aeroflot pilots eventually “smashing” 400 passengers into the ground right in Washington, and that’s it!” Deldyuzhov shrugs.

And he connects the irresponsibility of officials with their lack of specialized education.

The former head of Aeroflot, Minister Savelyev, graduated from the mechanical engineering department of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1977, after which he worked as an adjuster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, chief technologist in a construction trust, from 1993 to 1995, as indicated in the official biography, he was the chairman of the board of Rossiya Bank, owned by a friend of the president Yuri Kovalchuk.

» In Soviet times, the person responsible for the aviation industry, as a rule, was himself a graduate of some aviation institute, just as the Minister of Agriculture was a graduate of the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy, and the Minister of Health was a doctor. Now the industry is run by people without special education who talk about optimizing management and costs, but they don’t know the industry from the inside. Personnel in all positions are selected on the principle of personal loyalty, not competence, as a result, the army is headed by Shoigu, who has never served a day, Roscosmos is led by Rogozin, continues Lukashevich. – This is a general trend, a paradigm of economic management in the country, which was built by the government. If there is a general crisis in a country, there cannot be an enclave in which this crisis does not exist.”

Punishment for the innocent

Lukashevich says that a separate item is the investigation of disasters: after each of them, if the reasons have been established in good faith, experts, as a rule, draw conclusions and issue appropriate regulations, the task of which is to prevent a recurrence of the accident.

He is convinced that the competition that unfolded some time ago over who exactly will deal with this issue, and the problem of the effectiveness of the established procedures, only aggravate the general crisis in the industry.

“In Russia, for a long time, the investigation of accidents was carried out by the so-called Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), a supranational body independent from the Russian government, created by the CIS countries back in the early 90s; in the mid-2010s, a conflict broke out between it and the Federal Air Transport Agency. IAC, against the backdrop of several incidents in a row due to a malfunction of the Boeing 737 disaster management system, temporarily revoked the airworthiness certificates, which is what it should have done. But for airlines, each case of such a recall is fraught with serious losses,” says the expert.

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As a result, in 2016, the Russian government took away the certification authority from the IAC, handing it over to the Ministry of Transport, and in May 2020, it announced its intention to close the incident investigation procedures to the same Federal Air Transport Agency.

Lukashevich emphasizes that while the international community never had doubts about the impartiality and professional competence of the IAC, which is why the investigation into the death of the Boeing MH-117 shot down over Donbass was initially transferred to them, then the same cannot be said about the reputation of the Federal Air Transport Agency.

“And the Malaysian Boeing was taken away from MAK for a reason, they were simply removed from the investigation, and now, when we hear about the transfer of functions to the Federal Air Transport Agency, we must understand that this service is tightly tied to national carriers and has a certain conflict of interest,” says Lukashevich .

The expert is convinced that when establishing the cause of the disaster, carriers, including state-owned ones, are not interested in recalling their vehicles - they will have to pay out of their own pockets for forced downtime during the investigation - but in blaming everything on the pilots, “if everything is their fault.” pilots, then everything is fine, we’ll continue flying.”

“The main task of the supervisory authority is not to punish the perpetrators, but to regulate the industry and create the prerequisites for reducing accidents,” he emphasizes. However, his colleagues doubt that Rosaviation is currently able to carry out current control at the proper level.

Camouflage Mastery

Oleg Panteleev recalls that at the moment in civil aviation there is a requirement for one hundred percent decoding and analysis of objective control means, that is, flight recorders, in order to proactively respond to possible deviations in piloting technique.

“Even before an emergency occurs, we can notice that the pilot is somewhere overestimating the bank angle and speed, and correct this in time,” he says.

But, as practice shows, the requirements for decoding by airlines are not fully met, moreover, the current system does not encourage them to do this, the expert is convinced.

» Airlines, having discovered deviations, do not report them to the supervisory authority. Moreover, the concealment of the facts of such incidents is far from isolated, the analyst concludes. “That is, instead of obtaining very important information without paying such a high price for it as human life, and stopping the problem, companies create the preconditions for the “gun,” to use the classic language, to fire its fatal “shot.”

Panteleev is convinced that the reason for fraud with reporting is the reluctance of carriers to spoil the “statistics”. However, the practice of “camouflaging” incidents in the interests of carriers goes far beyond the bounds of ministerial reports.

“After we had already boarded at Sheremetyevo and the passengers were released to the airport, no one even met us,” says Tatyana Bocharova, a participant in the recent story of the “depressurization” of the plane. “Neither the ambulance, nor the airport staff, nor the company even came to us. After waiting a little, in fact we ourselves went to wander around the building, right with our bags, in search of an office, and when we found it, we were given papers that there was no emergency landing: “Your flight did not take off anywhere, it was just delayed,” and offered just go to the backup. As a lawyer, I understand perfectly well why this was done: to avoid possible claims and liability. Some, by the way, refused to fly further and simply went home. Moreover, I understand them, I myself now only take the train, no planes, it may take a long time to travel, but there is solid ground under my feet!”

President of the Interregional Trade Union “Sheremetyevo Flight Staff Trade Union” (SHPLS) Igor Deldyuzhov partly agrees with Tatyana. Until the situation in the industry and the attitude towards safety among its leaders changes, flying on Russian planes will not become safer, he is convinced.

“We regularly write complaints to the prosecutor’s office about overtime, pilots’ failure to comply with rest periods between flights, and other violations of safety rules, but the prosecutor’s office and government agencies write out 50 rubles in response. fine and that's it. If problems are not solved chronically, such leaders need to be driven out, but this is unlikely to happen soon, so: “Fly on Russian Railways!” the head of the Sheremetyevo trade union sneers.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

• Scary statistics: this year there have already been 7 major air crashes in Russia.

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