�Strange� crash of Baku aircraft in Armenia

At the same time, in those tragic days, two aircrafts crashed in Armenia. In one of them were people who were sent to assist the Armenians; in the other, humanitarian aid destined for survivors of the disaster zone. What kind of airplanes were they, and was the crash accidental?

Turan news agency asked this question from the Azerbaijani historian, publicist Teymur Atayev, who in his research on the Armenian-Azerbaijani confrontation touched on this page of history, which still remains unknown to the masses of people.

- The Soviet soldier Viktor Nikolayev told that in the first days after the earthquake, because of thick fog, a "Russian IL-76" started descending not along the glide path twelve seconds earlier, and crashed into Ararat." According to him, there were 44 search-engine specialists and humanitarian aid on board. V. Nikolayev also cites data on the crash of the Yugoslav An-12 aircraft "when landing at the Yerevan airport". What can you tell about these facts?

- First of all, I would like to note that, according to official data, in addition to the assistance sent by Azerbaijanis to the Armenians living in the earthquake zone, over the first three days after the natural cataclysm, the State Committee for Oil Products of the Azerbaijan SSR sent to Armenia more than 25,000 tons of fuel, 880 tons of solid and liquid bitumen, about 40 thousand tons of fuel oil, 330 thousand tons of lubricating oil ", more than 120 heavy and special vehicles, 46 truck cranes, as well as bulldozers and excavators.

As for the crashed aircraft, in the absolute majority of cases the direction of the route of one of them is not fixed, and the second one is somehow presented in half tones. Even Ivan Sukhomlin, the deputy head of the Main Department for the National Economy Complexes of the USSR "Gosstroy", who organized the delivery of construction equipment to Armenia in December 1988, confined himself that "on the third or fourth" day after the earthquake, "two catastrophes occurred: the Yugoslav aircraft and one IL-76 crashed." So, if the Yugoslav "trace" is clearly highlighted, then what about the IL-76, all the certificate of the crashes of aircraft of this brand from 1988 to 2001 specifies: "On December 11, 1988, when approaching Leninakan, an Il-76MD military transport aircraft of the Soviet Air Force crashed".

- Indeed, the definition "Soviet aircraft" in relation to the situation with the earthquake in Armenia in 1988 sounds at least strange. The Armenian SSR was part of the Soviet Union. Apparently, there was something to conceal?

- Of course, an Internet portal providing information on aviation incidents and plane crashes of military aviation in the USSR and Russia, pointed Baku as a departure and starting point for this aircraft"s route; and even states that the plane carried "military personnel called up from reserve to participate in debris after the earthquake in Armenia". However, the document does not disclose what kind of persons they were and where they were from, and only provided information about 77 dead (9 crew members and 68 servicemen) and one survivor, who was "in the back of a truck, was seriously injured."

The reason for the silence is only in the fact that there were residents of the Azerbaijan SSR on the plane, flying to help the victims of the earthquake in Armenia. This is also recorded by the website of the BBC Russian service: "Civil defense fighters from Azerbaijan were sent to distress Armenia."

- Is there information on the Internet confirming this detail not from Azerbaijani sources?

- Ten years ago, the then commander of the air defense forces of the USSR Ministry of Defense of the Southern Strategic Direction, Petr Polyakh shared his memories with the Ukrainian press. He spoke about the quartering of the 6th civil defense regiment in Baku at that time, so that "those called up from the reserve would be transferred to Leninakan for dismantling of debris". The Il-76 that arrived from Tula, "70 soldiers-assignors (one deployed company) and two KamAZ were loaded with mattresses and blankets. One conscript came running when all the benches were occupied and got into the back of the truck. According to Polyakh, the place of the crash looked terrible: there were nine dead bodies among the debris. Their bodies were found according to "flight form". As for the "69 passengers", the revelations of P. Polyakh reveal their religious identity. "According to custom, a Muslim must be buried on the day of death," he says, "relatives demanded the bodies of their loved ones." Under these conditions, "there was no time for identification," and "a charred piece of the body was considered one person." In this way, 69 coffins were formed and "sent to Baku." On each of them were "put uniforms, on top they wrote the names." The only survivor was a passenger who was forced to take a seat in the back of a KAMAZ truck. "He flew out of the strike along with the mattresses and broke his spine," and became disable.

- The name of the survived is Fahraddin Balayev.

- Yes. It was he who said that immediately after the Spaak earthquake, the inhabitants of Azerbaijan "gathered for the compulsory charges at that time in Balajari" (the district of the Baku conscription center), announcing that they would be sent to Armenia. The then commandant of the city (Baku lived under curfew conditions) M. Tyagunov "urged to forget the old grievances and fulfill his international duty", threating, otherwise, the "military tribunal". The "vaults" included Azerbaijanis, Lezgins, Russians, Jews and Armenians.

- As for the crash of another aircraft on the territory of Armenia in December 1988 (the 12th), as far as we know, you were the first to attempt to take a more detailed look at the situation with its "geographical origin".

- You know, the crash of this aircraft did not give me rest for many years, because one moment fixed in my memory. The first message about the crash of this aircraft was made on the central Soviet TV in the daytime - in the special issue of "News", devoted to events in the earthquake zone. The announcer read about the crash of an aircraft with a humanitarian cargo to the disaster zone from Turkey. However, in the evening in the daily information program "Time", the announcers read out the text about the crash of the aircraft not from Turkey, but as Yugoslav plane. The next day I looked through almost allcentral Soviet press, but the Turkish trail of this aircraft disappeared hopelessly. Only a few people, who by the will of fate, turned out to be at the TV that afternoon, confirmed that they had also heard about the crash of an airplane from Turkey.

- What did you manage to find in this matter more than 15 years after the tragedy?

- To begin with, some details were very interesting, sounded hot after the catastrophe from the then chairman of the government of the USSR (Gosavianadzor) Rudolf Ambartsumovich Teymurazov who headed the commission investigating the crash of the plane, headed by the commission investigating the crash. Reporting the tragedy of the flight that followed "on the Skoplén-Yerevan route" (this clearly refers to the capital, which was part of Yugoslavia Macedonia - Skopje, Skopje today), he drew attention to the fact that, although the "air route" of the aircraft was "through Bulgaria and Turkey", "there was no landing at intermediate airports".

A bit strange, isn't it? Why did the head of the crash investigation commission pay special attention to the nuance, something that shouldn"t be of interest to the Soviet and world public - was the landing at the intermediate airport or not? However, the details of this kind were incredibly important, at least at that time. After all, a rather ominous picture came to the surface: if information about the flight to Yerevan from Turkey was confirmed, then it turned out that out of hundreds of airplanes flying to Armenia from all over the world, only two suffered - Baku and Turkey.

So, it was established, in fact, that the flight Skopje-Yerevan landed in Turkey. Thus, in an article posted by the aviation history section of the flightglobal.com website of the British aerospace weekly magazine Flight International for December 1988 (24/31 December 1988), the An-12 aircraft departs from Skopje in the direction of Ankara on December 11 (in the original: "The An-12 had departed Skopje on December 11 and routed via Ankara").

In turn, the portal Aviation Safety Network reveals that the flight of the Yugoslav An-12 (Yu-AID) aircraft on December 12, 1988 was part of the operation to assist Armenia after the earthquake on December 7, 1988 by air "(in the original:" Yugoslavian Anton 12 YU-AID was part of the air relief operation following an earthquake in Armenia on Dec. 7, 1988 "). Following what the site"s description of the accident is, the aircraft specifies (in original: Departure airport: Ankara (unknown airport) Turkey); "Airport of destination: Yerevan Airport (EVN/UDYZ), Armenia").

Perhaps the intermediate landing of the Yugoslav aircraft in Ankara (in front of Yerevan) was forced (for one reason or another), but the fact remains: this aircraft flew to Armenia as a flight: Ankara - Yerevan. As such, he was perceived by the Armenian dispatchers. In those days, Armenian airports worked with a huge load. Only on December 13, 103 planes from the republics of the USSR and "11 heavy planes from other countries" arrived in Zvartnots Yerevan. As the then deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Armenian SSR Y. Khojamirian noted, "transport planes arrive every 12 minutes, not counting passenger ones."

Thus, taking into account the workload of the Armenian dispatchers in those days, there is nothing surprising in their acceptance of the Yugoslav aircraft, due to an intermediate stop in Turkey flying to Armenia already as an Ankara - Yerevan flight, for the Turkish.

- Information, of course, is shocking, causing a lot of thoughts. Well, what were the findings of the commissions that investigated both crashes?

- The official reason for the crash of the Baku flight was the "crew"s error in installing an airfield of 100 mm Hg at barometric altimeters, which caused an overestimation of the flight altitude by 1100 m and a collision with a mountain slope at a given altitude at night".

Similarly, in the aspect of the crash of the Yugoslav aircraft: the perpetrators were identified in the person of the pilots, who, according to R. Teymurazov, "did not set the required value for the "atmospheric pressure of the airfield" on any of the indicators, because of which overestimated by more than 800 meters, which played a fatal role. "

We would like to add that the memory of the dead Yugoslav pilots in Armenia is immortalized (a monument was installed at the site of the crash); nothing of the kind happened in relation to the crew and the plane going to the disaster zone from Baku to the Il-76. Only a wonderful literary critic from Kazakhstan, Elsah Suleimenov, in his speech at the first congress of people's deputies of the USSR (1989) reminded the deputies "about the plane crash from Baku" in which "50 Azerbaijani soldiers who volunteered to help their neighbors flew to the aid of the earthquake in trouble". "These guys," said O. Suleimenov, "wanted to contribute to the restoration of friendship, and they contributed what they could to their lives." But "they don"t have a monument, their names were not mentioned in the press, only their mothers know about their fate".