Four minutes after taking off from Moscow on February 11 afternoon, a Saratov Airlines Antonov An-148 headed for Orsk plummeted 6,000 feet into the ground, killing all 71 one people on board. In the aftermath, the images that appeared on television were all too familiar. Jagged metal scattered in a snowy field. Trees ripped apart, debris hanging from their branches. Police lines and disconsolate relatives. Roses placed beneath the departures screen at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport.
On February 12, Russia’s investigative committee said that the plane had not broken up or caught fire before it dropped from the sky, and that an “explosion occurred after the plane fell.” The crash site was relatively compact. All this suggested that the latest tragedy was not due to terrorism, unlike the two planes brought down by suicide bombers in 2004, or the 2015 Sharm El Sheikh disaster. Instead, the investigative committee said it suspected the “airline’s activities, the technical condition of the aircraft, the level of the pilots’ professional preparedness, [and] whether they underwent the necessary training.” If a poorly trained crew was the cause, it wouldn’t be the first time.
