Crew blamed for Armenian air crash

Western Mail, UK
July 27, 2006, Thursday
First Edition

RUSSIAN air safety officials said the crash of a commercial airline
in May that killed 113 people was due to pilot error.

The pilots of the Airbus-320 operated by Armenia’s Armavia airline
allowed the plane to descend too low as it faced bad weather on its
approach to the airport outside the Russian resort town of Sochi.

Tatyana Anodina, the head of the region’s civil aviation agency,
said an automated system warned the two pilots that the plane was
flying dangerously low, but that a last-ditch effort to gain altitude
failed to head off the crash into the Black Sea.

‘The human factor in bad weather played a role,’ Russian Transport
Minister Igor Levitin said. Most of the victims were Armenian, but
there were also 26 Russian citizens.