Aviapedia

Su-24 crash in Amur region

On the 17th of January blackbox of the Su-24 frontline bomber was found. Su-24 has crashed on Monday, the 16th of January near the “Vozhaevka” airfield in the Amur region. As the head of the Air Force press-service colonel Alexandr Drobyshevskiy said to RIA Novosty, blackboxes are in good condition. Right now Moscow committee under command of deputy of the Air Force Commander-in-Chief Alexander Zelenin is working on the crash site.

Frontline bomber Su-24 crashed on Monday, at about 15:00 during its regular flight by far-east union of Russian Air Force and Air Defence. Pilots guided plane into a safe zone and ejected. By the Drobyshevskiy words, both pilots are in satisfactory condition and right now they are on their airforce regiment territory, under doctors supervision.

The official version of the bomber crash reason wasn’t declared yet. By the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Forces army general Vladimir Michailov words, it will be determined in the nearest days. He said that blackboxes should show the exact picture of the accident.

By the preliminary data, the reason of accident became the plane’s technical defect, to say exactly - malfunction of the wing geometry variation system. “Definitely, it is not a pilots fault”, said Vladimir Michailov.

As he added, “Before landing the wing of Su-24 didn’t take the sweep position, pilots had made 20 landing approaches. It was unsafe to do landing, in any case it would cause aircraft destruction, so it was no point to put this risk on pilots.”

We need to mention, during the all Su-24 aircraft operating life it’s only the second crash. The first one happened in August 2003 near the Chita and caused death of two pilots. That time Su-24 crashed into the mountain during it’s regular training excercises.

Sergey Minenko