Cracked glass and landing gear fall off: the number of incidents in Russian aviation is growing

According to rough estimates by Novye Izvestia, in less than a year there have already been more than 130 incidents involving civil and military aviation. 28 aircraft crashed (excluding the zone of the SMO).

Yekaterina Maksimova

If we take only the most recent state of emergency and only with the participation of large Russian airlines, then over the past few months there have been about a dozen such stories.

Here, for example, is only the autumn-winter TOP air incidents.

On September 9, the Boeing-738 of Pobeda Airlines was unable to take off at Vnukovo Airport due to pieces of the fuselage lost by someone. The metal parts “lost” the other side and the pieces of iron ended up on takeoff (presumably, it was a special aircraft that was not indicated in the schedule). October 21 in Kazan (but no one is to blame here) Airbus-321 AK "Nordwind" collided with a hare during the run.

On November 1, a fuel leak occurred from a Boeing 737-800 of the NordStar JSC in Pulkovo. The next day in Irkutsk, an Airbus of Ural Airlines lost its landing gear during landing, which paralyzed the port for several hours. On October 12, the flight of AK Rossiya from Sochi to Istanbul was delayed - the engine did not start at the side of the Sukhoi Superjet.

On November 3, Nordwind Airlines dealt with a Boeing -737-800 aircraft, whose windshield cracked during a flight from Sochi to Ufa. At the end of November, in the Khabarovsk Territory, an An-24 aircraft of Khabarovsk Airlines lost four tires due to emergency braking: the ship accelerated to 160 km per hour and at that moment the pilot saw a truck on the runway. On November 29, the crew of the Rossiya aircraft company during landing at Pulkovo reported that the flaps of the Airbus aircraft were jammed.

On December 1, Boeing AK Nordwind, flying from St. Petersburg to Goa, did not go to India, but to an alternate airfield (to Sheremetyevo): the crew reported a smooth depressurization in the pressurized cabin. Back in December, right during the flight, the co-pilot (Boeing-738 Pobeda) on the Makhachkala-St. Petersburg flight lost consciousness. He had a fever.

In all these cases, fortunately, there were no casualties (only the hare died), but some passengers had more gray hair, and the list of aerophobes probably replenished.

The founder of the international network of AIM Group experts, aviation expert Andrey Patrakov clarifies that when evaluating such statistics, it is very important to evaluate the flight: how often incidents occur per flight unit. And in the current year, when the flight traffic for a combination of reasons has significantly decreased (as well as passenger traffic), the dynamics in terms of the number of accidents “is not going for the better”.

“But in order to be convinced of this, to speak reasonably and to compare with last year, we need to take stock. By the end of the year, statistics on raids will become available. And it can be clearly correlated: such and such a raid and so many incidents. And here, as always, the devil hides in the details: what kind of incidents. The hare was shot down, or is it an Irkutsk story with a locked chassis, when they sat down, as the common people say, on the handbrake, ”says Patrakov.

As an example, Andrei Patrakov cites non-combat losses of military aviation: “There this year, the situation is just the opposite in terms of flight. The number of incidents has grown significantly. We fly more - we fall more.

Novye Izvestia has repeatedly cited the opinion of experts who expressed concern about the current state of the aviation industry. Especially now, when the fleet of foreign aircraft was left unaccompanied by Western developers. And the international organization ICAO directly points Russia to non-compliance with the rules in the field of flight safety.

“The expert community, to put it mildly, expressed its concern back in February-March. And when the Minister of Transport told us that the Iranian scenario was waiting for us in terms of resisting sanctions, he did not mention the sad statistics. And it in Iran began with an increased number of incidents and then grew into a series of disasters. And our task is to make sure that this does not happen. I, as an expert who claims that there are problems, would rather be fooled. This is better than being right and irreparable tragedies will begin to occur in our aviation, ”added Patrakov.

In his opinion, for the whole year, one can hope that the statistics of air accidents will be better than in 2021. Then Russia broke the absolute anti-record in terms of the number of disasters and people killed in them. “This year, I hope, the statistics will be better: we fly less - fewer accidents,” summed up the founder of the international network of experts AIM Group.

In 2021, 31 air crashes involving civilian and military vessels occurred in Russia, killing more than 100 people. Among the crashes with the highest number of victims is the tragedy with the An-26 aircraft in Kamchatka (July 6, 2021), when 27 people died. The plane crashed into a rock. In October last year, an L 410 made a hard landing in Tatarstan with more than 20 people on board. For 16 passengers, this flight was the last.