Two passengers and one crew member on the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan told Reuters that they heard at least one loud bang as it approached its original destination of Grozny in southern Russia.
Flight J2-8243 crashed on Wednesday in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian attack drones. At least 38 people were killed while 29 survived.
Subhonkul Rakhimov, one of the passengers, told Reuters from hospital that he heard a loud bang and thought the plane was going to fall apart. “It was as if it was drunk – not the same plane anymore,” he said.
Another passenger, Vafa Shabanova, also heard a loud bang and said there was a second bang. She was then told by a flight attendant to move to the back of the plane.
Flight attendant Zulfugar Asadov said landing was denied in Grozny due to fog so the pilot circled at which point there were bangs outside the aircraft. “The pilot had just lifted the plan up when I heard a bang from the left wing. There were three bangs,” he said.
Azerbaijan Airlines suspended a host of flights to Russian cities on Friday and said it considered the crash was caused by what it termed “physical and technical external interference”. It did not detail what that interference was.
Four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan’s investigation into the disaster told Reuters on Thursday that Russian air defenses had mistakenly shot down the plane. Russia has said it is important to wait for the official investigation to finish its work to understand what happened.
The crash has underscored the risks to civil aviation even when aircraft are flying hundreds of miles from a war zone, especially when a major drone war is underway. Previous disasters include the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 in 2020 by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, killing all 176 people on board.
The Azerbaijan Airlines plane got into trouble near Grozny which is more than 850 km (530 miles) from the front lines in Ukraine, but still a repeated target for Ukrainian drones which have struck far behind Russian lines. Russia uses advanced electronic jamming equipment to confuse Ukrainian drone location and communication systems and a large number of air defense systems to shoot down the drones.
Russia’s aviation watchdog said on Friday the plane had decided to reroute from its original destination in Chechnya amid dense fog and a local alert over Ukrainian drones. It said that the captain had been offered other airports at which to land, but had chosen Kazakhstan’s Aktau.