On May 9, the veteran Russian pilot
Alexander Yablontsev was flying an exhibition flight over the mountains of
Indonesia when he radioed in to flight control with an odd request. There was
bad weather ahead, and he asked permission to drop more than a kilometer in
altitude to avoid it. Normally, a plane is supposed to climb to avoid thick
clouds, not descend, especially when flying over the craggy peaks and cliffs of
the Indonesian archipelago. But, apparently trusting Yablontsev's judgment, the
controller gave him permission to descend. Minutes later, the plane slammed
into the nearly vertical peak of Salak mountain, near Jakarta, and exploded on
impact. All 45 people on board were killed, most of them journalists and
Indonesian airline officials, and the wreckage, as well as the human remains,
went tumbling down the face of the cliff.
Since then, experts have been
debating one crucial question: What would have led Yablontsev, one of the most
experienced pilots in Russia, to make such a perilous call? The picture is
still murky, and because of the mountainous jungle terrain in that part of
Indonesia, rescue workers were only able to recover the flight recorders on
Sunday, four days after the crash. It will take weeks if not months to analyze
them. But the consensus emerging among observers is that Yablontsev may have
been showing off the plane's capabilities, perhaps in front of passengers
allowed into the cockpit, before the plane dove toward the mountain top.
The plane he was flying, the brand
new Superjet 100, is the pride of Russia's civil aviation, the only commercial
airliner designed and built by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Yablontsev and his crew had been taking it on a road show of six Asian
countries, ferrying around potential buyers in Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Burma
before taking the show to Indonesia. Although the immediate purpose of the tour
was commercial — the owner of the Superjet, the Russian fighter jet maker
Sukhoi, wanted to sell as many planes as possible — the trip also had political
significance. The Superjet is meant to restore at least some of the prestige
that Russian engineering had lost after the Soviet collapse, when Russian
machines began to disappear from the fleets of major air forces and commerical
airlines. Months after Vladimir Putin first became Russia's president in 2000,
he oversaw the beginning of the Superjet's development as a point of national
pride.
On Wednesday, the parent company of
the Sukhoi announced that during the Superjet 100's six-country tour of Asia,
when it was in Pakistan, one of the planes was sent back to Moscow after the
crew noticed a problem with the engine. Sukhoi then sent a replacement
Superjet, which continued the tour with the same crew. That was apparently the
plane that crashed. The pilot's decision to descend remains a main focus as a
likely cause of the crash. On Tuesday, a senior aviation official in Indonesia
reportedly said, "The main question is why the pilot veered off course."
But even without this latest crash,
healing the image of the Russian aviation industry was never going to be easy.
Russia had the worst air safety record in the world last year. More than 100
people were killed in at least five plane crashes, and two of the world's five
deadliest air disasters in 2011 happened in Russia, including the crash that
killed the entire Lokomotiv professional hockey team. The year before, the
president of Poland and most of his government died in a plane crash in western
Russia while flying a Russian-made plane. In another notorious incident in
2008, the Russian captain of a flight from Moscow to New York slurred his words
so badly as he made his welcome announcement before take off that the
passengers demanded a new pilot, believing the captain was drunk. The flight
attendants tried to calm them down, but finally allowed the passengers to
disembark after a TV celebrity who happened to be in first class refused to
fly.
During the Superjet's road show, it
appears that the usual flight protocol was not always followed. For one thing,
the door of the cockpit was sometimes left open, allowing passengers to talk to
the pilots and enjoy the view through their windows. When the plane first
crossed the equator, Sergei Dolya, a Russian blogger and travel writer who was
on the tour, dressed up as Poseidon and went sprinkling water on the flight
crew in a kind of mock pagan ritual. On his Twitter account, Dolya posted
pictures of himself in the cockpit, naked from the waist up, wearing a beard
made of tinsel and holding a trident made of aluminum foil. The photos show the
co-pilot, still seated at the controls in mid-flight, laughing as he snapped
pictures of Dolya-Poseidon on his mobile phone.
On Sunday, these antics led the
German magazine Der Spiegel to suggest that frivolity may have had a lot
to do with the disaster. The Superjet's tour was "not just business,"
the magazine wrote, and a "lack of seriousness" could have
precipitated the crash. It quoted Herry Bakti, aviation director of the
Indonesian Ministry of Transport, saying that Yablontsev's decision to drop
toward the mountains may have been motivated by a desire for a better view.
"We suspect that he wanted to show passengers the military base,"
which is in that area, the official is quoted as saying.
Dolya, the blogger, was supposed to
be on that doomed flight, but he sat it out in order to take pictures of the
Superjet during take-off. Speaking to TIME on Sunday night, when he returned to
Moscow from Jakarta, he says he is outraged by the allegations in Der
Spiegel and denies that the Superjet's tour was a "merrymaking,
drunken" journey. "The pilots were professionals who knew what they
were doing," he says. "Had they been 30 meters higher, or 40 meters
to the right, they would have made it." The only time that Dolya went into
the cockpit was during his romp through the aircraft dressed as Poseidon.
"Yes, we were having some fun," he says. "We sprinkled the
pilots with a bit of salt water. It was no harm, no foul."
But the same cannot be said of
Yablontsev's request to descend, or his apparent decision to ignore the warning
system that would have gone off as he came too close to the mountain. On May
10, the day after the crash, experts at Russia's leading flight school, in the
town of Zhukovsky outside Moscow, carried out a simulation of the Superjet's
flight, and they concluded that the pilot may have turned off the warning
system while entertaining passengers in the cockpit. "It is simply
impossible not to notice the signal from this warning system," one of the experts
told told the Izvestiya daily.
Pending the investigation, Sukhoi
has declined to comment on any possible reasons for the crash, as has the
Russian government, which owns Sukhoi. The Indonesian company whose
representatives were on that flight, Sky Aviation, has meanwhile suspended its
purchase of 12 Superjets. Orders for around 200 others, mostly for airlines in
Asia and the former Soviet Union, are still pending and likely to go ahead if
the cause of the crash is found to be pilot error rather than technical faults.
But that will not mean the Superjet has completed its mission. After this
latest crash, the good name of Russian aviation is no closer to being restored.
“Time” magazine By Simon Shuster / Moscow
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