An official inquiry into the Antonov An-26 military plane crash on Oct. 7 published some of its preliminary conclusions regarding the air incident’s cause, basically confirming allegations made by journalists and aviation experts saying that the tragedy was probably caused by a fatal malfunction of the aircraft’s left engine.
The Ukrainian Air Force’s An-26Sh, which is designed for navigation training, crashed late on Sept. 25 during a landing maneuver near a military airfield of Chuhuiv in Kharkiv Oblast some 430 kilometers east of Kyiv. Out of 27 persons onboard, mostly young cadets from Kharkiv Air Force University, only 1 survived.
An official commission of military and civilian aviation specialists immediately launched an investigation into the deadly crash.
“Today we can say that following the decoding of flight recorders, the march of events of the Antonov An-26Sh’s tragic sixth flight (on that day) has been fully restored,” said Oleh Uruskiy, the country’s vice prime minister for strategic industries and the commission chairman.
“Also, the content of communications among crewmembers and flight control center has also been restored.”
He said experts had established the cause of improper functioning of the aircraft’s left engine, which was detected as a drastic decrease of pressure by the aircraft’s torque meter.
“This happened due to a failure of one of the engine’s control system blocs,” according to Uruskiy.
Also, the inquiry revealed “grave violations, both in the conducting of air missions and in flight management in general.”
Earlier, shortly following the Sept. 25 tragedy, the official asserted that the crash had most probably been caused by a combination of technical failures and crew errors.
Ukraine’s Air Force’s Antonov An-26 takes off at a military airfield in the city of Chuhuiv on Aug. 27, 2014. Six years later, the aircraft crashed at the same location, killing 26 airmen on board. (Courtesy/Andriy Pilschykov)
Shortly following the crash, documents leaked in media suggested that the aircraft’s left engine AI‑24BT (produced in 1977) as of June 2020 had worked 589 hours above the norm without a major overhaul. It saw its last overhaul as far back as in 1990, but in 2020, its operational life was formally extended by 2 more years without renewal.
In the light of the revelation, some in the media accused the country’s military command of cutting corners on aircraft maintenance, which eventually led to the Sept. 25 crash.
The aircraft itself had a rather respectable age of 43 years in service, although it had as little as 5,985 hours in the air, while this family’s aircraft are normally expected to sustain 20,000 operational hours.
Civilian transport aviation pilots polled particularly by the Kyiv Post also agreed that the aircraft left engine could malfunction, and while such a situation is not necessarily fatal to the An-26, the crew could fail to try and disable its destabilizing influence and win back control over the aircraft during a key moment of landing.
The Air Force command repelled all accusations, saying that the aircraft had been in a fully operational condition after having sustained an appropriate set of repairs just months before the crash.
