- On July 10, 1985, an Aeroflot Tu-154 plane from Tatrystan crashed near the town of Uchkuduk
- There were 9 crew members and 191 passengers on board, all of whom died
- The crew was not properly rested before the flight and waited many hours for departure in poor conditions
- Irregularities related to the crew and flight conditions led to the disaster
The crew on this flight was very experienced. The captain had over 12,000 flights, including over three thousand in this type of aircraft, and the co-pilot was equally experienced.
At that time, flights were just starting from the new airport in Uzbek’s Karsha, and departure crews were flown there as passengers on other planes from Tashkent or elsewhere. It was a new airport, opened quickly, but without many amenities. The crew who arrived for the flight to Leningrad had to wait for many hours for departure in poor conditions. The crew did not rest properly before the flight, and the total standby time of the pilots was almost 24 hours. Despite this, the decision to start was made. There were 9 crew members and 191 passengers on board. The aircraft’s takeoff weight is 96%. maximum allowable.
At the appointed time, the Tu-154 takes off and heads to Ufa. At an altitude of five kilometers, the crew turns on the autopilot and sets it to a mode in which the plane continues to gain altitude, but at maximum speed and at a high angle of attack. For a ceiling of PLN 11,000. the plane climbs at a very low speed – 400 km/h. An alarm almost goes off in the cockpit.
To accelerate a little, the commander lowers the nose of the plane and pulls the autopilot lever towards him to regain altitude. As a result of his intense actions, the plane reaches critical angles of attack and an alarm goes off in the cockpit. The control is disturbed by the automation, which independently lowers the nose of the plane. The speed drops to 390 kilometers per hour.
Tu-154 CCCP-85311
The plane experiences slight shaking and is on the verge of stalling. To avoid this, the crew must put the engines in takeoff mode to gain speed. However, the crew makes a mistake and does the opposite of the instructions: switches engines to low throttle mode. The plane begins to descend again and the pilots pull the throttle and bring the plane back to critical angles of attack.
-The commander tries to maintain the current altitude at all costs. The speed continues to drop and reaches 330 km/h before it enters an uncontrolled spin.
At an altitude of three kilometers, the pilots still manage to stop the spinning, but they fail to start the engines. Forty-six minutes after take-off, a Tu-154 crashes into the ground near the town of Uchkuduk. At the time of impact, the aircraft had almost no horizontal forward speed. The next morning, a search helicopter finds the wreckage of the crashed plane. All 200 people on board died.
The conditions were typical for Central Asia: hot. In the heat, the plane takes a long time to gain altitude. The crew is believed to have turned on the autopilot and… fell asleep or fainted. The plane was gaining altitude; the autopilot maintained heading and attitude. The speed dropped and dropped as altitude increased (the pitch should be reduced at all times during the climb), but there was no one to lower the nose of the plane to restore speed. The crew was asleep. Eventually the plane lost speed and went down. Alarms went off. The crew woke up, but could not determine what happened to the machine in the first seconds after take-off, which is clear from the cockpit conversation records. Random actions only led to a flat spin from which the plane failed to recover.
Source: Wikipedia
