Vladivostok Air Flight 352

52.283333333333104.26666666667Koordinaten: 52 ° 17 '0 "N, 104 ° 16' 0" E

A Tu- 154M Vladivostok Avia

Vladivostok -Avia Flight 352 was a scheduled flight of the Russian national airline Vladivostok Avia Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, which crashed on approach to stopover in Irkutsk on July 4, 2001.

The Tupolev Tu- 154M crashed after a pilot error caused by flow separation. All 145 people aboard were killed. Time of the accident, it was the third worst aviation accident to date on Russian territory.

Circumstances of the accident

Flight 352 took off at 19:47 local time ( UTC 6) in Yekaterinburg and began about three hours later, the descent towards the airport Irkutsk. A few minutes later, at 02:05 (UTC 9), the runway came into view. At about 900 m altitude, the landing gear was lowered and reduced the speed to 395 km / h. Then, a left turn has been flown, the velocity further decreased to 365 km / h. To keep the altitude of about 850 m at a decreasing rate, the autopilot increased the pitch angle to 16.5 °, and the pilots were alerted by an acoustic signal at the high angle of attack. To fix the problem, disabled the first officer on the autopilot, where he brought the aircraft into an oblique position of 48 ° to the left. The nose of the aircraft fell off.

Due to cloud cover and the prevailing darkness, the pilots could not see the natural horizon. The captain tried to get by manually controlling the aircraft back under control, and the oblique position again reached 45 ° left. In order to reduce the extremely high sink rate of 20 m / sec (4000 ft / min), the pilots moved on height control, whereupon the nose of the Tupolev raised strong and there was a stall with subsequent flat spin. 22 seconds later, at 02:08, the aircraft hit the ground, broke and burned out.

According to the Russian Aviation Authority, the crew had to abort two landing approaches before the accident.