A friend and colleague of the commander of the crashed plane told MK about possible reasons disasters in Sverdlovsk region
Investigative teams continue to work at the site of the An-2 crash, which disappeared 11 months ago in the Sverdlovsk region. They were joined by representatives of the Federal Air Transport Agency and specialists from the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC). Versions of the death of the “corn grower” are multiplying exponentially. Experts talk about human factor, as well as about technical problems, in particular about a possible malfunction of the gas meter and fuel leakage.
MK contacted Leonid POPOV, the only observer pilot who worked with the deceased crew of Khatip Kashapov on all 10 forest protection missions in Serov in May-June 2012. An experienced flight engineer does not rule out that the plane could have crashed due to overload.
“The crash of the An-2 is a confluence of tragic circumstances, one of which could have been overload,” says 44-year-old Leonid Popov, an observer pilot of the Serov aviation branch of the Ural Forest Aviation Base. - The plane was old, you can imagine what kind of engine it had and how many times it was repaired. 13 people on board is a very, very large number for such a used car. For the new “maize”, such a number of passengers is the limit, despite the fact that previously they used normal aviation gasoline, 91. And here the gasoline was not airplane grade. However, we flew without incident, with a crew of three people: 2 pilots and an observer pilot. PIC Khatip Kashapov was a very experienced pilot, from the old guard, a Soviet breed, he knew the technology well, he literally felt the plane “with his skin.” Last season they and the crew did a great job Leningrad region. Khatip and I managed to become friends and were, as they say, “in the same boat.”
What made the commander take to the air without an assistant on that fateful evening remains a mystery. The version of the overload seems quite plausible if we remember that witnesses to the take-off on June 11 said that the “maize plant”, while climbing, touched the undercarriage with bushes on the edge of the airfield.
Leonid Popov with general director Avia-ZOV airlines Oleg Zolin were the first to fly out the next day in search of the missing An-2.
– We were looking for a plane to the Kytlym area. They looked out first of all for smoke, bonfires, and fire. Below in the summer in our places there is a continuous green veil, taiga. The smoke is clearly visible. Even a thin stream from a fire in good weather can be seen 20-30 kilometers away. Our former flight instructor Yuri Sobolev was on board there; he knew how to give a sign so that they could be seen from the air. Smoke was noticed about 15 kilometers from Kytlym. Then it turned out that lumberjacks were working in the area.
The plane was found in quarter 22-23 (the quarter is a division of the forest into rectangles with sides of 1 by 2 km - ed.) Have you examined the Katasma swamps from above?
There the taiga gives way to swamp areas and small lakes. In summer, little is visible under the dense canopy of trees. The wind blew, bent the tree and that’s it, we missed the right place. It's not even a second, but a fraction of a second. The search aircraft flies at high speed and covers areas quickly. The An-2 is about 12 meters long, and the pine trees and spruces there are under 30 meters.
According to pilot-instructor Oleg Zolin, the plane crash could have been caused by some incident in the aircraft cabin, which caused a fire on board.
It's possible. This “Annushka” can burn out in the air in 19 seconds. We don't know what could have happened on board. On a normal flight, all passengers sit quietly in their seats. And here are young guys, company. Suddenly they wanted to see something and crowded together on one side... It can be difficult for a pilot to level the board alone. That’s why two people fly: the PIC and the co-pilot.
- The remains of another person were found in the pilot's cabin. Could Khatip Kashapov let one of the passengers “steer”?
As eyewitnesses said, the airfield guard, former flight engineer Yuri Sobolev, sat in the cockpit of the PIC. It’s the same with us: if there is a disaster and there are casualties, then everyone blames the pilot, he is to blame. If there is an accident, it is the technician.
According to one of the versions being worked out by the investigation, the An-2 plane could have crashed during landing. The plane knocked down two trees, and after it fell, the rest rose again and covered the crash site, which is why it was impossible to find it from the air. The body of the “corner” was bent at the moment of impact, then a fire occurred, and possibly an explosion - the fuel in the tanks caught fire. Part of the aircraft - the fuselage and the engine - are located at some depression in the ground and, moreover, are hidden by water. The remains found at the crash site were badly burned.
The plane was found, but questions remain. The trajectory of the An-2's fall is still not clear. There were 700 liters of gasoline on the cornfield. He fell 8 km from the airport. Why did neither hunters nor gardeners notice the glow of burning fuel? Why didn’t the aircraft technician who remained at the airfield see the black smoke? As Oleg Zolin assures, “from the tower, visibility on a clear day is 10 kilometers.” It would seem that with such a fire, all the trees at the disaster site should have burned out. But eyewitnesses claim that green fir trees are emerging right from under the pile of metal.
To remove the burnt parts of the aircraft, a road is being urgently built through the swamps.
MEANWHILE
A Mi-8 helicopter belonging to the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, with almost two tons of explosives on board, crashed in Irkutsk region. According to preliminary data, 9 people died - their bodies were seen by searchers lying on an ice floe next to the crashed helicopter, which was transporting explosives and specialists to carry out work to improve the flood situation on the Lower Tunguska River.
At 12.54 Moscow time, a helicopter carrying 9 people along with crew members last time got in touch and then disappeared. And at 14.38, 7 km northwest of the village of Preobrazhenka, Katanga region, his remains were discovered from the air. The helicopter crashed, the reason is still being determined,” Oleg Voronov, head of the information department of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, told MK.
A source in local law enforcement said that the police received information about the discovery of presumably the remains of a crashed helicopter and dead people from one of the groups that flew out to search for the missing.
A search helicopter landed two kilometers from the crash site. Remains discovered from the air at the crash site human bodies“The wreckage of the helicopter itself lies on the ice floe,” the source said.
For now, we cannot say whether everyone who was in the helicopter died, the Ministry of Emergency Situations told MK. - The search team found a helicopter, but rescue squad until he approached, perhaps someone survived. Among those who were inside were five rescuers led by the acting chief regional administration EMERCOM Stanislav Omelyanchik and three crew members.
As the department explained, in the helicopter there was an additional team of rescuers from the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the Irkutsk Region, which had to urgently fly to the area of the village of Preobrazhenka due to a sharp rise in water levels on the Nizhnyaya Tunguska River. Ice jams formed on the river and the village was threatened with flooding. Demolition work was in the plans, but due to the sharply deteriorating situation, it was decided to carry it out earlier in order to protect the population. About 1,920 tons of explosives were loaded on board the helicopter. The chief specialist of the local center of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Igor Cherygin, who was also in the helicopter, was supposed to supervise the ice explosions.
Probably, not a single plane crash in the Sverdlovsk region has ever caused so much excitement, idle talk, hypotheses and fantastic versions, how much was connected with the search for the mysteriously missing and also incomprehensibly appearing An-2 aircraft. But, despite the fact that the legendary “corn grower” was still found (see “AiF-Ural” No. 19), the mystery of his disappearance continues to haunt minds.
Against payments
The head of the region, in fact, in the very first days announced that the families of the victims would be paid 1 million rubles from the regional budget as compensation. Yevgeny Kuyvashev’s statement so excited the public that real verbal battles immediately broke out on the Internet. Sverdlovsk residents criticized the governor’s emotional impulse, noting that they do not pay taxes so that they go to the relatives of lawbreakers.
The very next day, the estimated amount of compensation was halved. The authorities said that the families of the victims will receive 500 thousand rubles each from extra-budgetary funds. “People have been under constant stress for a year.
Naturally, such a situation could not but affect the health of relatives - it was undermined,” the governor expressed his opinion. - Families will be allocated 500 thousand rubles from the Governor's Program Fund. I emphasize that this is not budget money. Of course, these people are not heroes, but we are Christians, and it is important for us to help each other.”
The lowering of the monetary level did not soften the Urals. They continued their heated debate over justice decision taken. Many recalled that the An-2 passengers may have been drunk and, moreover, flew out illegally, either going fishing or going to the bathhouse.
Activists hastened to submit a petition to the governor demanding the cancellation of payments, and on May 11 a picket took place at the Popov monument against the decision to allocate funds to the families of those killed on the An-2.
“Oh, how many wonderful discoveries we have…”
From the very beginning, we followed the search for the missing An-2 plane with the whole family,” says our regular reader from Yekaterinburg, Maxim Petrovich Pakhaluev, with excitement. - Of course, it’s good that he was finally found. But we have a logical question: why did the whole region search for the mysterious “corn grower” for almost a year, and even with the help of neighboring regions, and was found completely by accident by two hunters? Yes, even two steps from the take-off point. After all, an airplane is not a needle in a haystack. I don’t want to say anything bad about our rescuers and police, but there is some kind of ominous mysticism in this...
Hostages of words
There were so many mystical, inexplicable and amazing moments around the search for the An-2 that now it would be possible to write a whole book, or even more than one. Let us recall that at first many high-ranking officials (including the governor, regional prime minister, and State Duma deputies) made loud statements, went to the search area, and almost personally went to the taiga. The secret of the missing plane was “almost revealed” without leaving his office by the scandalous politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky: in his opinion, the “corner” was hijacked in order to organize the escape of prisoners in one of the Sverdlovsk colonies.
However, after several months of careful investigations, the plane was never found, and government representatives became hostages to their words.
It’s amazing what the security forces, rescuers and volunteers didn’t find. During the search, they discovered another An-2, which had disappeared in the Middle Urals back in the 80s of the last century. A little later, the rusty skeleton of an Mi-8 helicopter was found.
"Double bottom"
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| Valery Gorelykh, head of the press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk Region: - Reproaches against search engines for not checking forests effectively enough are unfounded. The plane fell into a swamp; even hunters who know the taiga well found it difficult to find it. According to one of the versions being worked out by the police, the An-2 could have crashed during landing. The plane knocked down two trees, and the rest rose again after the fall and covered the crash site, which is why it was impossible to find it from the air. The body of the “corner” was bent at the moment of impact, then a fire occurred, and possibly an explosion - the fuel in the tanks caught fire. The remains found at the crash site were badly burned. Police officers found at the crash site not only fragments of bodies, but also personal belongings of the An-2 passengers. The road to the site of the disaster from the city takes about two hours, and you need to travel for an hour by transport, and another hour to walk through the swamp, wearing special boots, since it is impossible to drive here with any equipment. About the inaccessibility of this place in summer time The people who discovered the wreckage of the plane have repeatedly stated. They themselves found it difficult to reach him a second time, having complete coordinates. |
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Once, a resident of Nizhny Tagil, Valentin Degtyarev, caught radio signals from a missing plane. An amateur radio enthusiast intercepted some communications, but understood them in his own way. In the words “a braid of copper” he heard “there are bears all around.” Later, the Tagil resident, who was already preparing for the expedition, admitted his mistake.
It is clear that there were a lot of oddities. For example, the search headquarters in Serov received a message from one local citizen who told where to look for the missing An-2. It turned out that the man had a traumatic brain injury two weeks ago, and after that he allegedly began to have the gift of clairvoyance. True, after the signal, the newly-minted “psychic” for some reason began to avoid meeting with the police and did not pick up the phone. It later turned out that all this time, despite the heat, he had been “pumping up” himself with alcohol.
Once, more or less plausible information came from the Ugra Mansi. Sverdlovsk police received a message from Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug that another witness had been found. Allegedly last summer, a boy Ilya from the Mansi community was tending deer and saw a plane landing. Is it true, the exact date the child does not remember in the models aircraft doesn't understand. But, according to him, the “corn grower” tried to land in the area of Lake Turvat. The Mansi teenager’s chaotic description mentions that the lake has a “double bottom.”
SMS from hell?
The latest mystical events related to the missing An-2 occurred in April of this year. The son of the corn pilot Khatip Kashapov, Ramil, left a note on one of the Internet forums: “Mom called my father’s phone, it was turned off, but on April 4 she received an SMS that this subscriber appeared on the network. That same day everyone started calling my father, but the phone was turned off. Help us so that we don’t let everything go, this is a very big clue.” Ramil later reported that the SIM card had not been re-registered; it was still registered with his father. In turn, the pilot’s wife constantly called her husband’s number, although all this time the answer was the same: “The subscriber is unavailable.” And then she receives: “The subscriber is online again.”
It is unknown how all this mysticism would have ended, but in early May the legendary plane was finally found.
Fourth dimension?
At the time this issue was being typed, almost all the An-2 wreckage had been removed from the Katasminsky swamp, and the remains of the victims were sent to Yekaterinburg. At first, some problems arose with the engine of the “corner”: the unit weighing more than 600 kilograms did not want to get out of the swamp. The largest parts had to be evacuated using a tractor - to do this, a clearing was cut in the forest to the nearest road. In the near future, the wreckage of the “corn farm” will be sent to Moscow for a more detailed examination.
It is clear that everyone is primarily interested in the cause of the tragedy. There are three main versions: technical problem, piloting error and bad weather.
On this moment Investigators are “developing” the possibility that the plane crashed approximately three minutes after takeoff. Most likely, the corn plant hit a pine tree, after which it overturned and fell into the swamp. But this is still only a preliminary version.
Meanwhile, a popular story among ordinary Ural residents is that the “corn farmer” was simply pulled into a special space-time hole (the so-called fourth dimension). Allegedly, this is why they could not find him for so long.
There was no happy ending
Relatives of those killed on the An-2 plane lived for almost a year in confusion and anticipation - what if?..
Alas, there was no happy ending. On May 6, relatives and friends of the deceased An-2 passengers gathered at the fire station in Serov: here they were officially informed that their relatives had died. All this time, an ambulance stood guard in the service parking lot; fortunately, the relatives of the victims did not need its services. Outside the doors of the fire station, people were absent for more than an hour, leaving in silence - and quickly leaving the territory.
Collage by Yulia Ulyanova Relatives of the victims insisted on visiting the site of the An-2 crash. Rescuers led them to the place where the maize plant fell - the Katasminsky swamp can only be reached on foot. After this, some of the relatives of the victims said that they did not believe that searches were conducted in the swamp: “There are not even traces that anyone walked there. There was no one there. Let no one say that they were there.” Many Serov residents considered the statements of the relatives of the victims reckless. According to people, the relatives, on the contrary, should show gratitude for the fact that the plane was finally found.
In turn, the head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the Sverdlovsk Region, Mikhail Borodin, called on Sverdlovsk residents to show tolerance and compassion. “God forbid anyone find themselves in such a situation: the worst thing is when parents bury their children,” he said at a recent press conference.
It will not be possible to bury the dead immediately: on May 6, the remains were sent to Yekaterinburg for forensic genetic examination.
They searched in an area slightly smaller than France and Germany combined. The wreckage, along with the remains of the passengers, was found in a swampy forest near the airfield from where the plane took off without permission last summer.
The missing plane was found completely by accident. Hunters who wandered into these places in search of an animal trail initially mistook parts of the fuselage for a fallen power line support. And only when they were able to get closer did they realize: in front of them were the wreckage of a crashed aircraft.
The plane fell into the forest at an angle - here is the tail of the plane, wings, and in the swamp the engine and part of the cockpit, the fuselage of the An-2 was completely burned out.
Investigators and rescuers have already arrived at the suspected crash site and immediately began examining the scene.
"Together with forensic scientists right now investigative actions occur and are aimed, among other things, at identifying individuals on this plane,” said Dmitry Putintsev, head of the Ural Investigation Department for Transport of the RF Investigative Committee.
It is known that the An-2 took off on July 11 last year and disappeared without a trace almost immediately after takeoff. The pilot Khatip Kashapov and 12 passengers could have been on board. There was no exact list of people, as well as a waybill, since the flight was carried out without coordination with the aviation services. As it turned out, after the incident, this “maize plant” was usually used for fire monitoring of the taiga, but at the time of the disaster it was carrying out an unauthorized flight. Simply put, the pilot was driving local residents for money. For several months they tried to find the missing plane both from the ground and with the help of aviation, but the An-2 seemed to disappear into thin air.
Only now, when search teams have examined over a million square kilometers, the wreckage of the missing plane was unexpectedly found just eight kilometers southwest of the take-off point. After specialists arrived at the scene, it became clear why, despite all the forces involved, the An-2 could not be detected before: there are impassable swamps around the place where the An-2 fell, and the plane was badly damaged and will detect it from the air it is almost impossible.
The hunters who discovered the wreckage of the plane were the first to invite journalists to the site. The tail number was not preserved after the fire. You can't even see the airline's name on the body.
Investigators have no doubt that this is the same An-2 that took off from Serov on June 11, 2012; the color of the plane and some numbers on the parts, despite the fact that the side is badly faded, confirm this.
After the discovery became known, the Investigative Committee resumed the investigation of the criminal case. The first versions of the disaster are also emerging. The plane is believed to have crashed while landing.
“Judging by the fallen trees near the crash site, it still caught on a tree trunk, maybe even several. And under acute angle went nose-first into the swamp. He drowned by dashboard. That is, its propeller is entirely in the quagmire, and the engine is entirely in the quagmire. Were there any chances of escape, judging by the state in which the bones were, there were no chances,” says Yuri Motsarsky, a special correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper.
“Investigators who are working at the scene confirm that this is indeed the same An-2. The remains of at least ten people were discovered,” said Irina Sargsyan, a representative of the Ural Investigation Department for Transport of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation.
Police officers notified relatives and friends whose relatives flew on the ill-fated flight almost a year ago about the found wreckage of the plane. Personal belongings of the passengers were found today. The identities of the dead will have to be determined using DNA analysis.
After forensic experts conduct medical and technological examinations, the remains of the passengers will be handed over to relatives for burial. Officials at the site have not ruled out the possibility that a helicopter could be used to lift the plane's wreckage from the swamp.
On May 4, eight kilometers from Serov in the Sverdlovsk region, an An-2 plane that disappeared a year ago was discovered. On board the aircraft were pilot Khatip Kashapov and 12 passengers, including Serov traffic police chief Dmitry Ushakov and his subordinate Maxim Mayevsky. A long search for the plane, both on the ground and from the air, did not yield any results. Fragments of the bodies of 13 passengers and the remains of the plane were accidentally discovered by local hunters.
Serov hunters Sergei Skryabin and Alexander Kuznetsov were looking for capercaillie currents in the taiga, and not the An-2, which disappeared on June 11, 2012. “At first they thought that these were traces of a collapsed power line support, they set up a camp nearby and, when they got closer, they saw that it was an An-2 plane and the remains of people,” the local department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported. On the morning of May 5, representatives of the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the police went to the place indicated by the hunters. They confirmed the discovery of the missing An-2 and reported the presence of the remains of at least ten people at the crash site.
“The bodies were badly burned... During the fall, the plane collapsed, and, most likely, the fuel in the gas tanks caught fire,” says Valery Gorelykh, head of the press service of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the region. “It’s practically just bones.”
The nose of the An-2 almost completely sank into the swamp, and the top of the crashed plane was covered by the crowns of trees that survived the fall, which did not allow it to be discovered earlier during large-scale searches. The crash site turned out to be so remote that rescuers and police were only able to reach it using tracked vehicles. The Globus newspaper clarifies that the road from Serov to the site of the disaster takes about two hours - an hour by transport, another hour on foot through the swamp.
On May 6, fragments of the bodies of 13 people from the crashed plane were delivered to Yekaterinburg for forensic and genetic examinations to determine the causes of death and identify the victims.
An Interfax source in the technical supervision services of the Sverdlovsk region did not rule out that the cause of the An-2 crash could have been either an engine failure or the pilot’s banal desire to have fun. “A popular pastime among small aircraft pilots in the Urals is to scare wild animals by slightly crushing them with the wheels of the landing gear. It is possible that the flight participants also decided to scare the foxes,” the agency’s interlocutor noted. “Currently, the following main versions of the AN-2 crash are being considered, while none of them is a priority: a technical malfunction of the aircraft, pilot error and inappropriate weather conditions,” the Ural Investigation Department for Transport of the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
Although all versions are still equal, airport employees indicated that shortly before the disaster in one of the flights, for some reason the fuel supply to Kashapov’s An-2 engine stopped flowing (the pilots managed to return to the airfield). It is unlikely that the flight recorder will allow us to understand what happened to the plane. The head of the Sverdlovsk Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, Andrei Zalensky, said that the “black box” on board the An-2, which is activated manually, did not work. “Now they will most likely find it, and then it will be determined whether they tried to activate it or not,” he noted.
The authorities of the Sverdlovsk region, without waiting for the results of the examination and the conclusions of the investigation, have already promised to pay the families of those killed in the disaster a million rubles. Meanwhile, it is not entirely clear to whom and on what basis compensation will be paid if, for example, the pilot is found guilty of the crash - so far, in connection with the loss of the plane, a criminal case has been opened under Article 263 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of traffic safety rules and operation of air transport, resulting in the death of more than two persons through negligence).
The story of the loss of the An-2, which turned into a tragedy, at first looked quite comical. The aircraft of the Chelyabinsk company Avia-zov LLC, under an agreement with the Ministry of Emergency Situations in Serov, was engaged in reconnaissance flights to identify sources of forest fires. The pilot, who had nothing better to do (there was temporarily no need to monitor the taiga), decided to make some money on the curiosity of local residents - the plane appeared at the mothballed Serov airfield in May, causing a stir among local population.
On June 10, 2012, the residents of Serov “took a ride” on an airplane for the first time (according to the testimony of the airfield watchman, two groups of young people took part in the flight), and on June 12 they went for a ride for the second and, as it later became known, the last time. Your personal belongings and Cell Phones passengers were left in their cars at the landing pad. Both times, the An-2 took off from the city’s airfield without permission from ground services, while the pilot Khatip Kashapov did not know the area well, since he flew in the area only according to given landmarks.
It was also reported that the pilot and passengers of the missing plane may have been drinking alcohol on the eve of departure, after which they decided to “go for a ride.” But the general director of Avia-zov, Oleg Zolin, is convinced that Kashapov could not just take the plane away. “Either they took off due to circumstances that we do not know, or they were forced, or maybe intimidated by something. Although, I admit that they could also agree for money... But you need to be able to force an experienced pilot to break all the rules. Moreover, if the pilot of the aircraft was drunk, he would hardly agree to fly,” he doubted, pointing out that the police refused to listen to him, and in general classified the case incorrectly.
“It’s easier to hang up the article “violation of flight safety.” A security breach is already a consequence of the first actions - the hijacking of an airplane,” Zolin pointed out.
Flight mechanic Sagndyk Taubekov, who was also part of the crew of the missing An-2, but did not participate in the last flight, later claimed that he tried to stop the pilot Kashapov. But Zolin doesn’t believe him. “They all have my phone numbers. Call me and say: “The commander is stubborn, I can’t do anything.” Let me know! I had a crew nearby, in Sosva, 100 kilometers away. After the first rides on the 10th, they would have flown to Serov and washed Kashapov’s neck so much that no one would have thought it enough. There would not be a second case like this. Then I started shaking them - why didn’t they tell me? They told me: “We don’t do that.” How is this not accepted? Is it customary to kill people?” - he laments. However, the authorities are not yet planning to bring neither Zolin, nor Taubekov, nor any of the employees of the Serov airfield to justice.
Almost immediately after the disappearance of the plane, the head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Sverdlovsk Region, Mikhail Borodin, fired the police officers whose subordinates were on board the An-2, and the head of the State Traffic Safety Inspectorate for the Sverdlovsk Region was declared incomplete for service “for mistakes made in the education of personnel.” The Ural Transport Prosecutor's Office closed the airfield in Serov due to violations identified during the inspection. In particular, the airfield was not suitable for transporting people, runway grass grew. Oleg Zolin, general director of the Avia-zov company, said that he demanded that the airline employees “burn fires so that the landing strip can be seen.”
In the region, immediately after the plane went missing, a large-scale search and rescue operation was launched - not only rescuers, but also the Ministry of Internal Affairs and volunteers took part in the search - a total of about 1,500 people, Mi-8 helicopters, as well as An-2 and An-26 aircraft. In total, more than 30 million rubles were spent on the operation - a huge territory was examined, but in vain. Due to the fact that the plane took off without coordinating the flight with ground services, tracking its direction turned out to be extremely difficult: search engines relied on eyewitness accounts that contradicted each other. At the same time, investigators were forced to check the testimony of psychics and various enthusiasts, and the media, not without pleasure, practiced conspiracy theories, either broadcasting the version that the military was involved in the disappearance of the plane, or drawing inappropriate analogies with the death of a group of tourists led by Igor Dyatlov in 1959 at a pass in the search area An-2.
In November 2012, the search operation for the plane was stopped, although the relatives of the disappeared were against it. Together with enthusiasts, they continued their search until April 2013. In mid-May, representatives of relatives of those who flew on the plane made an appointment with the plenipotentiary representative of the President of the Russian Federation to appeal to Vladimir Putin with a request to resume the search for the plane. The meeting will obviously be canceled as unnecessary.
It was assumed that the aircraft could have been shot down by the military when it flew over the missile unit. And although the military denies this version, investigators are now checking it. The search for the plane has been going on for a week, but so far there are no results.
Today, the Ministry of Emergency Situations officially states that there was a pilot and 12 passengers on board the missing plane. This was the very first version: the pilot and 12 other people. And before that, the data changed: it was reported that there could be 13, 14 or 15 people on board the An-2. But today the Ministry of Emergency Situations reports 12 passengers and a pilot. Among these passengers are the head of the traffic police of the city of Serov and a state traffic inspector.
As the radio station "" reports today, relatives of the missing are talking about the possibility of the An-2 flying over a certain secret missile unit and that the military could shoot it down. The authorities, however, do not confirm this in any way. Moreover, the Ministry of Emergency Situations says that all this is fiction. Versions that the An-2 could have crashed near Karpinsk appeared almost from the very beginning of the search, but so far there has not been a single report that anyone saw a fire or any remains of the aircraft there. On hotline The Ministry of Emergency Situations continues to receive all kinds of information, it is being checked.
The relatives’ version is supported by the fact that the search has now been shifted to the area of the village of Kytlym, exactly where the missile unit is located. However, total area search area is 160 thousand square kilometers. It is completely unclear where the An-2 could have flown - the fuel in its tank would have been enough even for a flight to Khanty-Mansiysk, which is a 5-hour flight.
The missing plane. The military, meanwhile, refutes suggestions that they may be involved in the disappearance of the plane. “Presumably, the missing corn plant was flying at extremely low altitudes - almost above the tops of pine trees, otherwise our equipment would have detected it,” said the commander of the Air Force and Air Defense Forces of the Central Military District, Major General Viktor Sevostyanov. “I also want to refute the information of some media about that the military is involved in the disappearance of the An-2. We have nothing to do with this incident.”
In addition, it is reported that the Ministry of Emergency Situations plans to involve a drone in the search for the missing An-2. Earlier it became known that the Federal Air Transport Agency turned to military pilots with a request for help in finding the missing corn farmer.
Meanwhile, according to Lifenews.Ru, the head of the traffic police of the city of Serov Dmitry Ushakov contacted before departure by mobile phone with one of my friends. Ushakov’s friend, Sergei Frolov, told the publication where the An-2 passengers were heading and why. By pure chance, he himself was not on the ill-fated board - he was going to fly, but at the last moment he abandoned the flight. According to the man, before the flight, Ushakov called him and offered to go on a flight on a “kukuruznik” to Kytlym - for a maximum of an hour and a half.
However, the circumstances were such that Frolov could not keep his friend company, but went to his country cottage area. The next time the men called, Ushakov told his friend: “Wait for us, we will soon fly over you, you will see us!” But the plane never flew over the area where Frolov was located. Only the next morning his friend’s wife called him and told him that the plane had disappeared along with its passengers.
According to Sergei Frolov, it is rather strange that the disappearance of the plane was not immediately reported to the police. “The An-2 took off at ten in the evening, and its disappearance was reported only at half past nine in the morning,” he is indignant. “Apparently, one of the local pilots really wanted to hide the fact that illegal commercial flights were being practiced at the airfield, and precious time was lost ".
The An-2 aircraft, owned by the Chelyabinsk company Avi Call, took off without permission or notification on the evening of June 11. In connection with the disappearance of the An-2, a criminal case has been initiated under the article of the Criminal Code of Russia “Violation of traffic safety rules and operation of air transport, resulting in the death of two or more persons through negligence.” Moreover, the command of the Central Military District provided airfields to search for the aircraft.
