“This is a great tragedy that has brought great sorrow to the people of Azerbaijan,” President Ilham Aliyev said Thursday.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “It would be wrong to present any hypotheses before the results of the investigation are known.” complete.”
The Embraer 190 aircraft took off from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Wednesday morning. The plane was scheduled to fly to Grozny, Chechnya, but was diverted due to fog, the airline said.
A surviving passenger told Russian TV: “The pilot tried to land twice in thick fog over Grozny, and the third time something exploded.”
The plane was diverted to Aktau airport, about 450 kilometers east. Video shows the aircraft heading towards the ground at high speed 3 km (1.9 miles) from the runway before bursting into flames as it lands.
Kazakh authorities have recovered the flight data recorder and an investigation is ongoing. Shortly after the crash, Russian state TV reported that a collision between a flock of birds was the most likely cause.
But that kind of collision usually results in the plane sliding toward the nearest airfield, aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia told Reuters. “You can lose control of the airplane, but you don’t end up flying significantly off course,” he said.
Justin Crump of risk advisory firm Sibylline said patterns of damage to the plane’s interior and exterior suggested Russian air defense forces operating in Grozny may have caused the crash.
He told BBC Radio 4: “If you look at the debris pattern we see, it looks very similar to an anti-aircraft missile exploding at the rear and left side of the aircraft.”
