Authorities in a number of nations had been attempting to determine on Thursday what occurred to the passenger airplane that crashed a day earlier in Kazakhstan, on the shore of the Caspian Sea, killing 38 folks on board.
The Embraer-190 airplane, operated by Azerbaijan Airlines, had been flying on Wednesday morning to Grozny, in Russia’s Chechnya republic within the North Caucasus from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, however was diverted due to fog, Russian state information businesses reported. Shortly afterward, it crashed whereas attempting to make an emergency touchdown in Aktau, Kazakhstan, about 260 miles east of Grozny.
Of 62 passengers and 5 crew members on board, 29 survived, based on Kazakhstan’s authorities.
Investigative authorities in Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Russia mentioned they’d opened legal investigations into the crash. Kazakhstan’s transportation authority mentioned in a press release on Thursday that the airplane’s producer, the Brazilian jet maker Embraer, would even be analyzing the crash together with the Brazilian Air Force.
Aviation consultants mentioned that the airplane had been subjected to radar jamming and spoofing close to Grozny, and for a part of its journey it didn’t ship radar data. Flightradar24, a flight monitoring service, mentioned that the obtainable knowledge from the flight indicated that the airplane had issues with altitude management, and cited photographs from the crash web site that it mentioned confirmed “puncture injury” to a part of the plane.
The space round Grozny has been the scene of aerial battles in current weeks involving drones, often launched by Ukraine, and Russian air defenses. On Wednesday morning, across the time the airplane had been scheduled to land in Grozny, a sequence of drone strikes happened, based on residents and native information media stories.
Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation safety firm, mentioned in a observe to its purchasers on Wednesday that the airplane had seemingly been struck by Russian air defenses “throughout an incident of misidentification.”
The Kremlin warned in opposition to making any fast judgments concerning the trigger. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, advised reporters on Thursday: “The investigation is ongoing. We want to attend for its conclusions.”
President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan mentioned on Wednesday that “the explanations for the crash should not but identified.”
“There are varied theories, however I imagine it’s untimely to debate them,” he mentioned throughout a gathering with authorities officers.
Azerbaijan Airlines mentioned that it was suspending flights from Baku to Grozny and Makhachkala, in neighboring Dagestan, till investigations into the crash had concluded.
Qasim Nauman, Milana Mazaeva and Marc Santora contributed reporting.
