Aeroflot Flight 11

On 30 September, the plane was operating flight 11 from Moscow to Khabarovsk. A crew change took place during an intermediate stop in Irkutsk. At 15:10,^{[* 1]} the Il-12 took off from Irkutsk and headed towards the next scheduled stop on the route, Chita, with an expected landing time of 17:00. There were five crew members and 23 passengers on board; of the passengers, 21 were adults and two were children. 6–9 oktas of stratocumulus and cumulonimbus clouds at an altitude of 1,000 meters, rain, icing in clouds, and a north-northwest wind averaging (340° 17 m/s) had been predicted. In reality, the weather in Chita at that time was overcast and calm, with a visibility of 10 kilometers.^{[citation needed]}

After flight 11 left Irkutsk, it gradually began to deviate southward from its nominal route. The air traffic controller at the Irkutsk air traffic control center observed on radar that 21 minutes after the aircraft's departure (15:31), the plane had deviated 17 kilometers to the south. However, he did not instruct the crew to return to the flight path. The flight operations manager at Irkutsk Airport, Kartavov, did not monitor flight 11 and was therefore unaware of its deviation.

When the aircraft was crossing the airspace of Ulan-Ude Airport, the airport's controller (Malkovsky) did not activate the surveillance radar to monitor the aircraft, and, after receiving a true bearing of 92°, he did not plot it on a map. As such, the aircraft's movement was not tracked at all. By the time the Il-12 passed Ulan-Ude, it was already 30 kilometers south of the route. The crew was aware that the airliner was deviating to the south, but took no action to return to the route. Even when a bearing was received at 16:28 from the radio direction finder at Chita Airport, which, despite also having inaccuracies, indicated that flight 11 was south of the route, the crew did not adjust their course. As later established, they did not plot a single bearing on a map.^{[citation needed]}

As the aircraft exited the Irkutsk regional center's airspace and entered the Chita center's airspace, it was already 40–50 kilometers south of the route. At such a distance, the crew could not tune the radio compass to the non-directional beacons of Beklemishevo and Chita. They could also not receive bearings from an air traffic controller. Unable to establish communication via radio, the crew decided to descend to 2,400 meters. They spotted a road, which they assumed was the Romanovka–Chita road located north of Chita, and proceeded south along it, intending to follow it.

In reality, this was the Darsun–Aksha road. This road actually led them further south, away from Chita. Flight operations manager Makarov and air traffic controller Baranov received several clear bearings from flight 11 between 17:25 and 17:33, but did not monitor the flight. Even when the pilots reported that they could not locate the non-directional beacons, could not obtain bearings, and were essentially lost, the air traffic controllers did not offer assistance. While the crew had previously received bearings indicating they had veered south, the information went unused. Instead, the crew attempted to navigate visually, twice descending over unidentified mountainous terrain.^{[citation needed]}

After the failed attempts at visual navigation, the aircraft's fuel reserves were running low. Now completely disoriented, the crew reported to the Chita air traffic control center at 18:30 that they would make an emergency landing near a settlement they had spotted, the village Aksha. The crew made three failed approaches to the chosen landing site, each of which they aborted. During the fourth approach, at an altitude of 900 meters (200–250 meters above the selected site), the Il-12 crashed into a forested hill with an elevation of 1,000 meters. The airliner struck trees, resulting in the loss of the left wing upon impact. It then plowed through more trees for 340 meters, disintegrating as it went, before coming to rest on the opposite slope of the hill. The crash occurred at 18:55 MSK (00:55 UTC). The plane was three kilometers southeast of Aksha and 190 kilometers south of Chita. Rescue teams arrived at the crash site and found one severely injured passenger. The remaining 27 people (22 passengers and all five crew members) were killed.^[2]

The commission investigating the incident concluded that the crash occurred due to a series of errors and violations made by multiple different groups. The crew was found partly at fault, having lost orientation and subsequently taking incorrect actions in an attempt to recover. Air traffic controllers in the Irkutsk and Chita control centers failed to monitor the aircraft's flight and did not attempt to return it to the route.

The most egregious example of this was when the Chita controller (Baranov) did not attempt to determine the aircraft's location during the two hours and fifteen minutes it was in his airspace and did not issue any commands to the crew. After the crash, Baranov attempted to falsify the logbook, inserting that he had given the command "take course of 3°". Also, the flight operations managers did not supervise the controllers' work. When it became known that the crew of Flight 11 had lost orientation, they did not use the available bearings to return the plane to the route. Finally, the Ulan-Ude airport controller violated instructions by not activating the surveillance radar and not monitoring the flight. The commission also noted poor internal management within the 134th Aviation Squadron, with leadership failing to adequately supervise crew operations.^{[citation needed]}