A bird of steel won't fly over: why airplanes go down
The book by Anton Kaidalov and Dmitry Susanov, where the results of the investigation of the most famous domestic and foreign aviation accidents are collected, contains material for more than one fascinating feature film. And some of these movies have already been made. For example, "Miracle on the Hudson" - this case of masterly landing of Airbus A320 airliner on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009 is described in the chapter "Emergency landings". Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Anton Kaidalov, Dmitry Susanov
"The mysteries of airplane crashes: stories from the black box."
Moscow: AST Publishing House, 2024. - 352 с.
In general, "The mysteries of airplane crashes" - very psychologically intense, adrenaline reading, if you try to at least a little imagine yourself in the skin of the pilot, whose brain must compete with the onboard computer in the speed of reaction and analysis of a huge amount of diverse information. "A pilot is essentially a strategist," the authors write in the introduction. - And the first thing every pilot must learn is to "fly ahead of the airplane." The worst begins when the crew is 'late' for their airplane." This is the cross-cutting idea of the book - that "a pilot should always be one step, or even two steps ahead of the plane", and the authors trace it on the example of various tragic incidents, for example, the crash on August 29, 1996 of the plane TU-154, which was carrying Russian and Ukrainian miners with their families to Spitsbergen.
The complex of factors that led to the crash included not only the difficult terrain of the Svalbard airport, but also a different understanding of the dispatcher's function in Russian and Norwegian aviation. The thing is that our pilots are used to trust dispatchers unconditionally, and on Svalbard they were waiting for a dispatcher-informer: "His main role is not to give commands to pilots, but only to provide them with information. Later this small but very important detail would lead to a big misunderstanding. The information from this dispatcher our pilots, accustomed to the fact that everything the dispatcher says is an order, will take it as such and strictly follow his recommendations". Insufficient knowledge of English by the navigator and incorrect distribution of duties within the crew did not contribute to mutual understanding: as a result, the navigator was overloaded, became nervous and made mistakes, stopped keeping up with the lost airplane, which eventually crashed into a mountain: "The air crash was the largest in terms of the number of deaths in the history of not only Norway, but the whole of Scandinavia".
At the site of the Russian airliner crash in Svalbard
"Weaving behind the plane" and members of the crew of the TU-154 that crashed in Irkutsk on July 3, 2001. "The pilots stopped controlling the situation and allowed a situation where it was the airplane that controlled the pilots, not the other way around," Kaidalov and Susanov write, summarizing "inattention, lack of control, fatigue and insufficient knowledge of theory" as the causes of the tragedy. A technical detail also played its fatal role - the airplane, which had been flying for a long time for a Chinese airline, was equipped with a Western-style air horizon: "It was supposed to be a direct roll indication of the type "view from the airplane to the ground." In the Soviet Union, the air horizon was designed differently and assumed the reverse indication - "view of the airplane from the ground". In simple words, the difference was insignificant, but required a comprehensive understanding of the instrument's operation. Due to the fact that this particular airplane was purchased by the airline only two months ago, Commander Goncharuk simply did not have time to get used to a different airplane horizon".
Among the technical failures that can disorient the pilot and throw him out of the rut, the book repeatedly encounters fatigue cracks in parts, which are discovered at the most inopportune moment, or problems with speed sensors (so-called Pitot tubes). With negligent handling they can be clogged with ice, dust, and even become a shelter for insects: sand wasp, who managed to make a nest in the Pito tube, was the cause of death of the "Boeing" Turkish Airlines, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on February 6, 1996.
From birds, insects and technical failures, no one is 100% insured, although pilots are constantly practicing on simulators emergency situations, and the results of the analysis of each disaster are made conclusions and develop new technical recommendations. But much more striking are the human manifestations collected in the second chapter "Stupid Mistakes". Sometimes the consequences of thoughtlessness and carelessness, without casualties, are comical. Thus, on December 12, 1990, the pilot of the AN-12B, performing a "mandarin" flight from Batumi to Kiev, confused the de-icing system tumblers with the stop valves stopping the fuel supply to the engines. The case ended with an emergency landing, passengers and crew were injured, and the main loss was 12 tons of tangerines rolled across the field.
But some of the situations described in the book really chills the heart. For example, when you imagine an Airbus A310 flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters from Moscow to Hong Kong, in the cockpit of which one of the commanders decided to let his 13-year-old daughter and then his 15-year-old son drive. The co-pilot stopped watching the instruments at that time and filmed the young "pilot" vigorously turning the wheel back and forth, as a result of which the autopilot was switched off and the plane started to roll: "This was a feature of the A310, but the crew knew nothing about it. The situation was aggravated by the absence of an audible alarm signaling the autopilot disengagement. <...> A severe overload occurred. Because of it, the co-pilot could not return the seat to the working position, and the commander could not get at the helm." When investigating the reasons for the sudden crash of a perfectly serviceable airliner near Novokuznetsk, the commission was ready to admit the most fantastic versions like a collision with a UFO or an erroneous air defense practice, and only the decoding of the flight recorder shed light on the true cause of the deaths of 75 people.
An Airbus A320 airplane flying flight U6-1383 on the Sochi - Omsk route made an emergency landing
Still, the chapter "Miraculous Rescue" is a bit reassuring in the sense that people sitting in airplane cockpits are not always careless, thoughtless, absent-minded and arrogant. Often they are able to display fantastic composure, resourcefulness and professionalism bordering on heroism. This chapter details both the crash landing of an Airbus A321 in a cornfield near Zhukovsky on August 15, 2019 (recently reflected in Sarik Andreasyan's film "In the Sun, Along the Rows of Corn") and a similar "Miracle in a Wheat Field" that occurred four years later near Omsk.
In the latter "miracle", however, a significant role was played by the greed of the airline, which prioritized economic considerations rather than flight safety. Kaidalov and Susanov warned about the fact that banal greed is one of the important factors of airplane crashes at the very beginning of the book. But the authors prefer to finish it on a positive note, never tiring to remind that the airplane, no matter how you look at it, remains the safest means of transportation and its reliability increases after each catastrophe. The main thing is not to cherish your aerophobia, but to think about good things: "On the ground we all have a lot of problems and worries waiting for us, but in the sky life is easier. Appreciate this time.
