The first fatal accident anywhere in the world involving a passenger jet in 2024 happened on Christmas Day.
Thirty-eight passengers and crew died when Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 from the airline’s hub at Baku to Grozny, the capital of Russia‘s Chechnya, crashed short of Aktau airport in Kazakhstan; 29 survived.
“We will never forget the beloved people we lost in the crash of the Embraer 190 aircraft,” said Azerbaijan Airlines in a statement posted online on Boxing Day.
The pro-government AnewZ news station cited Azerbaijan officials as saying shrapnel from a Russian missile was responsible.
They allege the stricken aircraft was then denied permission to land at nearby airports in Russia and urged to head across the Caspian Sea to Aktau.
The news service said: “Presumably, this recommendation was given for one purpose: for the plane to fall into the Caspian Sea, all witnesses would be killed and the plane would sink.”
If Russian air defence action is found to have caused the crash, shoot-downs will be an ever-more common cause of fatalities in aviation accidents.
At a time when air safety is improving globally, military action against civil aircraft is an increasing concern.
These are the key questions and answers.
What do we know about the flight?
Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243, operated with an Embraer 190 passenger jet, took off from Baku airport at 7.55am local time on 25 December 2024. On board: 62 passengers, three cabin crew and two pilots. Their nationalities:
- Azerbaijan 42
- Russia 16
- Kazakhstan 6
- Kyrgyzstan 3
Their destination was Grozny, a distance of 301 miles from Baku.
The exact course of the flight is difficult to ascertain from publicly available sources because of GPS interference, which is prevalent in areas close to Russian borders. But the plane crossed the Caspian Sea from west to east on a highly erratic course with wide variations in altitude.
Once on the east side of…
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