MOSCOW, November 20 (RIA Novosti) – The pilots of a Boeing 737 that crashed in Russia last weekend did not report any major emergencies to air traffic control in the last moments before the crash, the Investigative Committee said Wednesday.
The aircraft’s captain did not speak to air traffic controllers after the jet overshot the runway and was ordered to make a go-around maneuver, a committee spokesman said.
He cited a preliminary examination of recordings of the crew’s conversation with air traffic controllers at Kazan airport in the Russian republic of Tatarstan.
The pilot had spoken to air traffic on his initial approach, saying the aircraft was in a “non-landing configuration” and he was commencing a go-round, the Interstate Aviation Committee (MAK) investigating the accident said.
The pilots turned off the aircraft’s autopilot system and applied full power when making the go-around. They then over-controlled, and manually pushed the plane over into a dive, in an apparent attempt to try to reduce the aircraft’s steep nose-up attitude, according to MAK’s preliminary report.
The pilots failed to take corrective action during the dive, which likely meant they were either panicking or froze in fear, Kommersant daily said Wednesday, citing unnamed aviation experts.
The jet slammed into the ground at an almost vertical angle after a 20-second nosedive during the go-around, according to data from flight recorders cited by MAK.
All 50 people on board died in the crash, which turned the jet into a ball of fire, the impact captured by airport surveillance cameras.
Investigators said they had found a tape from the cockpit voice recorder that fell out when the device smashed open on impact. The tape was sent to Moscow to see if any data could eventually be retrieved from it.
“The tape was damaged. It is up to MAK experts to decide whether it is possible to decipher the recordings,” said a spokesman for the Volga region transport investigation department, Dmitry Zakharov.
He said that pilot error and technical malfunction were still seen as the most likely causes of the disaster, and that there was no evidence of a terrorist attack.
Investigative procedures at the crash site were completed on Wednesday, with more than 1,000 plane fragments recovered for further analysis.
Though the plane was 23 years old and had been used by airlines in Uganda, Brazil, Romania and Bulgaria before returning to Russia, all its systems were functioning normally until impact, MAK said Tuesday.
