Aeroflot Katastrofy

The long, slim jetliner was trying to land at night in heavy rain at Sheremetyevo Airport, 18 miles northwest of Moscow, and by some accounts was making its fourth pass at the runway. Villagers in the nearby hamlet of Krasnaya Polyana (Red Glade) suddenly heard a series of explosions. Tramping by torchlight across muddy potato fields, they found the red and silver tail of the Aeroflot Ilyushin-62 sticking out of a cold brown pond. Beneath the water, or on the fields across which the plane had skidded, were the bodies of all the passengers and crew. Unofficial reports indicated that they numbered 176, which would be the largest loss of life in the history of civil aviation.*

It would also bring to nearly 400 the number of people who have died in Aeroflot katastrofy in the past five months. Just nine days earlier, a turboprop Ilyushin-18 carrying 106 known passengers and crew crashed into the Black Sea shortly after takeoff from the resort city of Sochi. No bodies were recovered. Last June a turboprop Antonov-10 crashed near Kharkov in the Ukraine, killing 108, many of them children on their way to summer holiday camp. In addition to the three Aeroflot tragedies, 156 people died in the crash of a Soviet-manufactured Ilyushin-62, operated by Interflug, the East German airline, near East Berlin last August.

When a reporter phoned the Soviet foreign ministry to inquire about the Moscow crash twelve hours after it happened, an official replied: "What crash?" It was another six hours before Tass, the official news agency, reported the disaster, and still another 18 hours before Pravda covered it in twelve lines on its back page. The Soviets had to acknowledge the tragedy because there were 38 Chileans and five Algerians aboard the flight, which had begun as a charter from Paris; if no foreigners had been involved, the crash might never have been reported. News of the Sochi disaster leaked out only after Aeroflot sent letters of sympathy, and symbolic, empty urns to the victims' next of kin, along with 300 rubles ($333) each in compensation. The Soviet obsession with secrecy--especially about major accidents--naturally breeds suspicions that there may have been other air crashes that went unreported.

Standees. Perhaps to counter international doubts about Aeroflot's safety record, Soviet authorities agreed to let two representatives of the U.S. Air Line Pilots Association visit Moscow to discuss the latest crash. One obvious talking point: Why was the Ilyushin permitted to attempt a landing in poor visibility when the airport's instrument landing system was out of action?

Easily the world's biggest airline, Aeroflot expects to carry 80 million passengers this year over its 350 trunk routes and 1,000 local services. Westerners find some practices disconcerting. For instance, the line commonly overbooks, and sometimes on domestic flights extra passengers squeeze aboard as standees. The possibility of overloading is increased by Aeroflot's habitual failure to check the weight of hand baggage. Soviet passengers often have as much stashed under their seats and in the overhead racks as they do in the baggage hold.

Many aspects of Aeroflot are difficult to assess. As the civilian arm of the Soviet Military Air Command, the airline is shrouded in security. Aeroflot pilots generally receive the same training --rated good by Western experts--as those in the Soviet military. They also have to undergo a physical examination before each flight. As for its planes, the airline itself clearly has doubts about one of them. All Antonov-10 aircraft, formerly workhorses of the Aeroflot domestic fleet, have been removed from passenger service since the Ukraine crash.

* In July 1971, 162 persons were killed after a collision over Japan between an All Nippon Airways Boeing 727 and a Japanese Air Force F-86 Sabre jet fighter.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.