VETERAN TEST PILOT SUSPECTS HUMAN ERROR CAUSED A320 PLANE’S CRASH
ITAR-TASS News Agency
May 3, 2006 Wednesday
Russia’s veteran test pilot, Magomed Tolboyev, has said he tends to
suspect the role of a human error as the chief factor that led to
last night’s crash of an Armenian airliner near the Russian Black
Sea resort city of Sochi.
Tolboyev, currently the president of the Aviatsia aviation corporation,
has said, the planes of this type have what he described as the “curved
image problem,” and the crew might have lost their bearings. At the
same time Tolboyev did not rule out mistakes by both crew and air
traffic controllers.
Interviewed live on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Tolboyev said
that the plane’s equipment allowed for making a landing in extremely
bad weather.
Air engineer, expert in civil aviation and flight safety Alexei
Komarov, who edits the Aviatransportnoye Obozreniye review, said that
according to statistics, A320 was a very reliable plane. Of the more
than 2,500 liners of this type in operation around the world a mere
twelve have suffered crashes.
The governor of the Krasnodar Region, Alexander Tkachev, tends to
share the human factor version, although in his opinion it is a
preliminary one and requires further confirmation.
The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry has blamed the Armenian
plane’s crash on bad weather. The Transport Ministry says this version
is most likely.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has ruled out a terrorist
attack. Public Relations Officer Nataliya Vishnyakova has said with
reliance to the investigators’ early findings “a terrorist attack
should be ruled out, because there is no objective evidence pointing
to this.”
There where 113 passengers and crew on board the crashed plane.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry 26 of them had Russian
citizenship. There were some Georgian citizens on board, too. Also
on that plane was Armenia’s former interior minister, chief of the
KGB security service Major-General Usik Arutyunian.
According to the latest reports, the bodies of 46 victims have been
recovered and brought to Sochi. Two have been identified.