Azerbaijan Airlines pilot's chilling five final words before plane went down killing 38
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Evidence was piling up today that Russian air defences hit the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane which crashed killing 38 people. The Embraer jet was likely wrongly targeted as a suspected Ukrainian drone by a Pantsir-S1 surface-to-air missile shot from the Naursky district of Chechnya. The apparent shrapnel damage to the aircraft - seen on the intact rear section of the doomed aircraft at Aktau in Kazakhstan - is consistent with such a strike.
So are the accounts of surviving passengers who spoke of an explosion outside the plane. At the time the plane had been seeking to land as scheduled in Grozny in Chechnya, of which it is capital, a Russian region headed by close Vladimir Putin warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, which has been under regular attacks from Ukraine in recent weeks.
It is Kadyrov’s forces who are suspected of firing a Pantsir-S1 at the plane. A partial text release of the alleged communications between the pilots and air traffic control indicates a catastrophic event which the crew assumed - it now appears wrongly - to be a collision with a flock of birds.
Struggling to control the plane with 67 people on board, the pilots help going to several different airports in three countries, Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. At 8:12, the crew reported “both GPS lost” on the Embraer E190AR, and sought help with “vectoring” to head back to the take-off airport Baku, evidently after the sudden closure of Grozny airport.
