As authorities in several countries tried to determine what caused the deadly crash of a passenger airplane in Kazakhstan, investigators and experts on Thursday were focusing on the possibility that a Russian air defense system had struck the plane.
Aviation experts cast doubt on a Russian agency’s contention that the jet had hit a flock of birds, saying images of the crash site show holes in the plane’s fuselage that appeared unlikely to have been caused by them.
The Azerbaijan Airlines jet had been flying on Wednesday morning from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, to Grozny, in Russia’s Chechnya republic, at a time when drone strikes were taking place around Grozny and Russian air defense systems were responding, according to residents and local news media reports.
Two Azerbaijanis briefed on a government inquiry said that Azerbaijani officials now believe that a Russian Pantsir-S defense system damaged the plane. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. Caliber, a news outlet in Azerbaijan that is close to the government, also reported that the country’s investigators believe a Russian Pantsir system was responsible.
The Kremlin warned against making any immediate judgments about the cause. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told reporters earlier Thursday: “The investigation is ongoing. We need to wait for its conclusions.”
Flightradar24, a flight tracking service, said that the Embraer 190 jet had been subjected to radar jamming and spoofing near Grozny, and for part of its journey did not send radar information. It said the available data indicated the plane had problems with altitude control, and cited images from the crash site that it said showed “puncture damage” to part of the aircraft.
The plane crashed while trying to make an emergency landing in Aktau, Kazakhstan, about 260 miles east of Grozny, on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Of the 62 passengers and five crew members on board, 38 were killed, according to Kazakhstan’s authorities.
Besides Azerbaijan and Russia, authorities in Kazakhstan said they had opened a criminal investigation into the crash. Kazakhstan’s transportation authority said in a statement on Thursday that the plane’s manufacturer, the Brazilian jet maker Embraer, would also be examining the crash along with the Brazilian Air Force.
While en route to Grozny, the flight was diverted because of fog, Russian state news agencies reported. Soon after the crash, Russia’s state aviation authority said that the plane had hit a flock of birds, causing it to attempt an emergency landing, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported.
But aviation experts and military observers expressed skepticism of that account, citing the recent military activity in the area near the flight path, the available information from aviation sources and videos and images posted by survivors.
The area around Grozny has been the scene of aerial battles in recent weeks involving drones, usually launched by Ukraine, and Russian air defenses. Osprey Flight Solutions, an aviation security company, said in a note to its clients on Wednesday that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane had likely been struck by Russian air defenses “during an incident of misidentification.”
Heinrich Grossbongardt, an aviation industry expert in Hamburg, Germany, said that data showing the plane’s trajectory, and footage of the aircraft, suggested that its electrical and hydraulic systems had been damaged, rendering the plane uncontrollable. According to Flightradar24, data received from the plane showed that its vertical speed oscillated more than 100 times during the final 74 minutes of the flight.
“You see an airplane flying wild, wild maneuvers with strong fluctuations in the course and in the flight altitude,” Mr. Grossbongardt said in an interview.
Had birds hit the engines, it could have caused them to fail, leading to a loss of power but still leaving the plane controllable, as happened on Jan. 15, 2009, to US Airways Flight 1549, which struck a flock of birds shortly after taking off from LaGuardia Airport in New York City, he said.
“We saw that on the Hudson River,” Mr. Grossbongardt said, referring to the pilots’ ability to successfully land on the water, saving the lives of all 155 people on board. “Here, a flock of birds? No way.”
He also cited video footage and images posted to social media that showed holes in the plane’s tail area as indicating damage to the plane’s control systems. The New York Times has not independently verified the video or images.
Some Russian pro-military bloggers have also pointed the finger at Russian air defenses. Yuri Podolyaka, a popular blogger, said in a post on Telegram on Wednesday that that the airplane likely had been “incidentally shot down by an air defense system.”
Another Telegram channel, Fighterbomber, which is believed to be run by Capt. Ilya Tumanov of the Russian Army, posted a video that it said showed it was unlikely that a bird strike had punctured the fuselage.
Azerbaijan Airlines said that it was suspending flights from Baku to Grozny and Makhachkala, in neighboring Dagestan, until investigations into the crash had concluded.
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