Honored Pilot of Russia Vladimir Gerasimov blamed the dispatchers of the Kharkov air transport control center for the crash of the Tu-154 plane, which occurred in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on August 22, the Izvestia newspaper writes .

According to Gerasimov, the Ukrainian dispatchers who controlled flight 612 Anapa - St. Petersburg did not allow the crew of the airliner to deviate from the assigned air corridor by more than 20 kilometers in order to avoid the thunderstorm front.

“In other words, the controllers suggested that the pilots try their luck. If the storm front ends after twenty kilometers, then good, if not, then sorry. The front has not ended,” noted the honored pilot of Russia.

Vladimir Gerasimov emphasized that sometimes, in order to fly around a thunderstorm front, the plane needs to deviate from the route by a hundred kilometers.

The order not to deviate more than 20 kilometers is due to the fact that this corridor was served by the Kharkov center. In order for the plane to deviate a greater distance, controllers from Kharkov should have contacted other control units, but decided not to do so.

“Following our plane, a Turkish one flew, it turned around and returned to the airfield. And our airliner continued its journey,” said the honored Russian pilot.

The version that the pilots asked the air traffic controllers for permission to deviate 20 kilometers from the course is refuted by a source from the Novye Izvestia newspaper - an aviation safety expert close to the investigation into the circumstances of the plane crash.

According to him, the Tu-154 pilots asked Donetsk air traffic controllers to allow them to fly around the thunderstorm at a distance of 15 kilometers, but received the go-ahead only for a deviation of 2 kilometers. “Apparently, after this the pilots were unable to find a safe passage,” the expert emphasized.

A source in the Ministry of Civil Aviation of Ukraine confirmed this version to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper . The width of the thunderstorm front was tens of kilometers, so two kilometers was clearly not enough for a deflection, he noted. Obviously, this is why the Tu-154 commander decided to bypass the thunderstorm from above.

An employee of the Ukraerorukh enterprise, whose dispatchers were the last to communicate with the Tu-154 crew, told the publication that the pilots of the plane were warned that there was a thundercloud ahead. Before the crashed airliner took off, two planes passed it safely.

“Half an hour before the disaster, a plane was flying at the same place to Rostov, and it flew around the cloud as much as 20 kilometers to the east. What is the Pulkovo Tu-154 doing? Instead of flying around it from the side or from below, it flies straight into the inferno - into cloud. I was amazed when I looked,” said the Ukraerorukh employee.

Let us recall that on August 24, the Minister of Transport of Ukraine Nikolai Rudkovsky said that the commander of the Tu-154 flight 612 requested permission from the Kharkov zonal air traffic management center to pass 20 kilometers east of the established route in order to avoid a thunderstorm. The crew was allowed to make this maneuver.

Experts blame Ukrainian air traffic controllers for the Tu-154 crash