Helicopter crash - Grossly overloaded Mi-26 - Russia News

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114 died in Russian helicopter crash

At least 114 servicemen were killed when a troop transport helicopter crashed outside a Russian base in Chechnya, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said.
The crash yesterday (Aug. 14th) outside the Russian military headquarters of Khankala, near the Chechen capital Grozny, was Russia's biggest military air disaster, media said.
In televised remarks from Khankala, Ivanov said there were 147 people aboard the huge Mi-26, more than one and a half times the helicopter's capacity. ORT television said the dead included one child, who was traveling with his father, a serviceman.
All five crewmen survived the crash. The passengers were a mix of officers, conscripts and contract soldiers returning from leave or traveling to Chechnya to relieve units that were to have been rotated out of the region, state television reported.
The helicopter's flight data recorders were found and were being examined at the nearby Mozdok air base for examination, Interfax said. The recorders should shed light on whether the helicopter experienced a technical malfunction or was shot down, as the Chechen rebels claimed.
Ivanov said he was suspending the army's aviation commander, Col. Gen. Vitaly Pavlov, until the investigation into the crash was completed. Ivanov said Pavlov had violated instructions, but that these violations were not connected to the crash.
Officials did not say why so many servicemen were on the flight. However, the Kommersant newspaper reported today that Mozdok had suffered a spell of bad weather in recent days, with rain and heavy fog, and that flights had been irregular in any case because of inadequate supplies of fuel and spare parts.
Overcrowded flights, carrying up to 110 people instead of the 85 for which the helicopter was built, in addition to cargo, were the norm, Kommersant said.
The paper described a horrendous scene of servicemen clambering out of the helicopter, only to set off explosions in the minefield planted to prevent rebel incursions into Khankala. First-aid workers had to call in sappers to clear a path to the burning helicopter before they could set to work.
However, Podoprigora denied that the helicopter had landed in a minefield.
"The helicopter fell and caught fire and, according to information I have, nobody was blown up by mines," he was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.
The pilot reported hearing a thump on the right side of the helicopter, and monitoring equipment in the cockpit signaled a fire, Russian media reported.
Soldiers on the ground and pilots in an accompanying helicopter said they saw ground fire, media reported - backing up the rebel claim that their missile had brought down the helicopter - and the pilot requested permission to perform an emergency landing because of a fire in the right engine.
The helicopter fell from a height of 200m, and missed the tarmac at Khankala by 300m, the Izvestia daily reported. It said the heavy, slow-moving model - which servicemen referred to as "the cow" - has virtually no armor, making it especially vulnerable to attack.
Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov and Defence Minister Ivanov flew to Khankala on Tuesday to oversee the probe, following President Vladimir Putin's call for a "full and objective" investigation. Prosecutors opened a criminal case for murder and terrorism, Russian news agencies reported.
The crash came amid a spate of rebel actions against Russian forces in Chechnya, including attacks late last week in southwestern Chechnya that killed nine servicemen and five civilians.
Some analysts surmised that rebels had intensified their actions to underline to the Russian government that it should enter peace negotiations.
A Chechen rebel representative met last week in Geneva with a former head of Russia's Security Council, to discuss restarting talks that have been stalled since last year.
Russia's government maintains that the war it launched in the breakaway Caucasus Mountain republic in fall 1999 is all but over, with just isolated groups of rebels holding out. However, Russian soldiers are killed almost every day in rebel attacks.
Russian forces withdrew from Chechnya following a devastating 1994-1996 war that left the region de facto independent, but they returned in 1999 after Chechnya-based militants invaded a neighboring region and the Kremlin blamed rebels for apartment-building bombings killed 300 people in Moscow and other cities.


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