Translated material
The last signal from the depths
The radio beacons of the crashed airliner's recorders may soon fail
Yesterday, the sea tug "Navigator" set off from the Sochi port to the place where on the night of May 3 the A320 plane, flying on the Yerevan-Sochi route, fell into the Black Sea and sank. A set of equipment is installed on the deck of the tug that allows you to control the RT-1000 deep-sea robotic manipulator. This robot must lift two flight recorders of the airliner to the surface. Without deciphering their records, it is impossible to know what exactly led to the tragedy. However, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Force, Army General Vladimir Mikhailov, already said yesterday that “the weather is apparently to blame for everything that happened.” “We will get these recorders, decipher them, and this will only be confirmed,” the Air Force commander said yesterday. “The fact that the commander decided to return—it was necessary to return. You should never change your mind. This leads to such serious consequences,” says Vladimir Mikhailov.The head of the Federal Agency for Sea and River Transport of the Russian Ministry of Transport, Alexander Davydenko, who heads the headquarters for technical support of the work on lifting the structural elements of the crashed Airbus A320 of the Armenian Airlines from the bottom of the sea, yesterday, unlike Mr. Mikhailov, did not make any sensational statements, he only told reporters that the Navigator tugboat arrived at the scene of the disaster at seven o’clock in the morning, but at 14 o’clock work on lifting the recorders had to be suspended due to rising winds. Now the search area at the bottom is limited to a square of 20 square meters. m. Moreover, it is known for sure that the distance between the “black boxes” is only five meters.
Two flight recorders of the deceased airliner lie at a depth of 496 meters. Due to the complete absence of vertical water exchange in the Black Sea, a dead hydrogen sulfide zone begins from a 200-meter depth. The aggressive environment quickly corrodes even metal, and, according to experts, the radio beacons of “black boxes” have no more than 16 days left to “live.” When they stop functioning, it will be almost impossible to find the recorders at the bottom. The period of two or three days within which the operation can be completed, named on Monday by the head of the Russian government commission, Russian Minister of Transport Igor Levitin, is considered too optimistic in Sochi.
According to the Armenian media, employees of the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), who investigated the causes of this plane crash, have already done everything they could do without having transcripts of the “black box” recordings. At the end of last week, the General Directorate of Civil Aviation of Armenia received an official message from the IAC in connection with the death of the Armavia A320. It details the circumstances of the disaster.
The document, in particular, states that the first communication between the Sochi dispatcher and the aircraft crew took place at 1 hour 10 minutes. 20 sec. Then there was an intensive dialogue between the dispatcher and the crew about the weather conditions at Sochi airport, which led to the decision of the aircraft commander, Grigory Grigoryan, to return back to Yerevan. The decision was made at 1 hour 26 minutes. 37 sec. But at 1 hour 30 minutes. 49 sec. the crew received a new, more optimistic report, and the commander decided to continue the flight. The next contact with the dispatcher took place at 2:00 am. 45 seconds, when the plane was already in the coverage area of the Sochi airport locator. The crew was allowed to descend from an altitude of 3600 to 600 m. At 2 hours 10 minutes. 45 sec. the crew reported that the landing gear was extended, and at the same moment the landing controller confirmed that the weather allowed the plane to land. However, 30 seconds later, when the plane was at an altitude of 300 meters, the controller ordered to stop descending and make a right turn to go around. The Airbus began to gain altitude, but at an altitude of 450 m its speed dropped and it began to descend “before colliding with the water surface.” The last conversation between the crew and the dispatcher took place at 2:12 am. 34 sec. And at 2 hours 13 minutes. 02 sec. the liner and 113 people on board were no longer alive.
Mikhail Bagdasarov, the owner of the Armenian airline Armavia, which owned the crashed plane, said in Yerevan yesterday that, in his opinion, the A320 could have landed at Adler airport on its first approach: “The weather was bad, but not so bad that the plane I couldn't sit down." At the same time, Mr. Bagdasarov called not to make a fuss about this issue and to wait for the official results of the investigation.