MOSCOW, February 14. /TASS/. The crew of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan failed to correctly assess the situation and send a distress signal in Russian airspace, said Oleg Smirnov, a civil-aviation expert at the Public Council of the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Transport.
"The crew of the Azerbaijan Airlines’ Embraer aircraft performed erratically, according to the published transcript. The pilots failed to cope with the stress. The style of their conversation with each other is dumbfounding: Foul language in the cockpit is absolutely unacceptable under the regulations. The aircraft’s pilot-in-command accuses his co-pilot of incompetence, which confirms the evidently insufficient level of the pilots’ skills. The crew also failed to correctly assess the situation and issue a May Day distress signal in Russian airspace. We are waiting for the final conclusions of the commission," he told TASS.
Alexander Yakovlev, chairman of an expert council in the field of civil aviation, also said the crew was completely unprepared, psychologically and professionally, for an approach using systems other than the global navigation satellite system. According to the expert, this situation prevented the crew from landing at the destination airfield. Also, the crew was unprepared for an approach using a backup system, a non-directional beacon signal, which is an option in the conditions of unstable GPS connection or GNSS failure. A warning about possible GPS interruptions had been published in the Notice To Air Missions service, Yakovlev said.
"The crew notes that they can’t use the range instrumentation and the Instrument Landing System, indicating that the airplane has limitations. Unfortunately, the crew shows poor training in crew resource management. The co-pilot says that this is his first NDB flight," the expert said.
According to Yakovlev, the crew made the right decision to make a go-around maneuver because when they saw the runway, they realized that the runway was significantly to the left and the aircraft was above the glide path.
"However, the crew’s further moves, after they embarked on the go-around procedure, are erratic and inconsistent, with some signs of panic. The second approach was not completely stabilized and erratic, which made a landing impossible again, although the weather conditions met the minimum requirement for an NDB landing, like in the first case, with a visibility of 3,300 meters and a vertical visibility of 240 meters," the expert said.
Oleg Panteleyev, executive director of the aviation news agency AviaPort, said the plane accident revealed a problem.
"Flight crews working on modern aircraft have largely lost their manual piloting skills. Even simple mental navigational calculations are hard to do for many pilots. Dependence on automation is reaching a critical level," he said.
In the absence of a GPS signal, the crew had difficulty making the landing approach using the signal of the non-directional beacon installed at the Grozny airfield. Even when air controllers supported the crew and performed vectoring, or called the course to be followed at any given moment, the landing approach could not be performed. Panteleyev also noted that there were difficulties not only in determining the coordinates of where exactly the aircraft was, but also the altitude of its flight. The co-pilot conceded that he had never made a landing approach before, relying solely on NDB signals and the air controller’s prompts.