MOSCOW, October 7 (RIA Novosti) - Valery Troyanov, the pilot of a Russian fighter that crashed in Lithuania in late September, will not be punished but could have enabled an emergency signal earlier, the Air Force commander said Friday.
"No disciplinary measures will be taken against Troyanov," General Vladimir Mikhailov said. "The investigation has shown he was not much at fault in the accident."
He said, however, that Troyanov's plane had had additional safety equipment that he had failed to use.
Troyanov returned to Russia's Kaliningrad region Thursday after nearly three weeks under house arrest in Lithuania. The pilot will leave for Moscow at 3 p.m. Friday.
Lithuanian investigators concluded the crash was an accident.
"The Lithuanian side has completed all checks and made sure that it was not a subversive flight and concluded that it was caused by mistakes of the pilot and traffic controllers," Mikhailov said.
"We will continue the investigation of the accident, because we did not have the flight recorders before," Mikhailov said. "We will conduct [our own] investigation to prevent repetition of such incidents in the future."
Mikhailov said that the Russian side was considering ways of sending the wreck of the plane back to Russia for scrapping.
Mikhailov also said he would fly to Kaliningrad on Sunday to attend command-and-staff exercises and then personally visit all the traffic control offices that guided Troyanov's flight.
