Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan “doesn’t look like” bird strike as suggested by Russia, experts say

There was speculation on Friday that the Russian military was involved Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash which killed 38 people and left 29 injured in Kazakhstan on Christmas day, and experts doubting Moscow’s proposal that bird strikes were the reason.

Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190, was flying from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to the city of Grozny in Russia’s North Caucasus on Wednesday when it was diverted for unknown reasons two days later. At one point during the flight the plane’s GPS tracking was reported to have jammed, resulting in a significant deviation from the flight path.

The plane crashed while trying to land at another airport in Aktau, western Kazakhstan, after flying east across the Caspian Sea. It came down and burst into a fireball about two kilometers from Aktau airport.

Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Russia all opened investigations into the cause of the crash, but it was Russia that faced direct questions two days later. The Kremlin has urged people not to jump to conclusions, and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who has forged close ties between his country and Russia during his two decades in power, has also said speculation is too close.

“The information given to me is that the plane changed its route between Baku and Grozny due to bad weather and headed for Aktau Airport, where it crashed on arrival,” he said, as Russia’s aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, suggested the birds strike. the idea.

But a U.S. official told CBS News that there are early indications that a Russian anti-aircraft system may have shot down the plane in an area where Ukrainian and Russian forces have traded drone and rocket fire for months. This official who spoke to CBS News, who did not want his name to be disclosed, said that if that is true, it will further emphasize Russia’s recklessness in its ongoing attack on Ukraine.

Private aviation experts have also cast doubt on the bird strike theory, and pointed to the damage seen on the plane’s fuselage as evidence of a more unlikely explanation.

“It sure doesn’t look like a flock of birds,” said CBS News aviation safety analyst Robert Sumwalt, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

“Birds don’t fly the way the damage was done to this plane,” Sumwalt added.

Instead, the damage has signs of shrapnel from an air-to-air missile, and British military veteran and security analyst Justin Crump told CBS News’s BBC News affiliate network that “the theory is that it may have been hit by an air defense missile — almost certainly. Russian.”

Azerbaijan Airlines and Russia respond to an accident in Kazakhstan

Azerbaijan Airlines, in a statement reported by international news agencies on Friday, said the plane encountered “external physical and technical disturbances” during the flight, without providing further details.

Dmitry Yadrov, the head of Russia’s aviation association, Rosaviatsia, said in a statement on Friday that the Azerbaijani plane crashed during or after a Ukrainian drone attack near Grozny, where it was supposed to land. According to the Associated Press, Yadrov said “the situation in the Grozny airport area was very difficult” at the time, citing both the alleged Ukrainian drone attack and heavy fog in the region.

He did not directly address the allegations that the passenger plane was shot down by Russian jets.

Speaking to reporters on a conference call, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also refused to comment on Friday regarding allegations that Russia might be involved in the accident, saying that it will be up to investigators to clarify the cause.

Some survivors of the crash said they heard an explosion before the plane went down.

“Ukrainian drones were operating at the time, and this is consistent with everything we’ve seen with the pilots and air traffic control,” Crump told the BBC.

Ukraine did it relying heavily on explosive drones to strike Russian military targets and infrastructure within the western region of the larger neighboring country in the past year, and Russia often shoots down its air defense systems.

For many observers, the circumstances of the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines and the damage of the plane crash remembered that the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014. That passenger jet was hit by a missile launched by Russian-backed forces in Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

Among those desperate for answers to the latest disaster in Kazakhstan are survivors of the crash, including one man who said he was in a hospital bed sitting next to his wife on the plane when it crashed.

“From now on, I have never seen my wife.”

Investigators found both so-called “black boxes” – the flight data and cockpit voice recorders – at the crash site. Experts from Brazil, where the plane was built, were due to arrive in Kazakhstan on Friday to help retrieve and analyze data from them.

As the investigation continues, the Ukrainian government on Friday called on Russia to take responsibility for the crash, as Azerbaijan Airlines reportedly suspended services to seven Russian cities.