Big PR war surrounding the “superjet” accident
On May 5, during an emergency landing at Sheremetyevo Airport, the Sukhoi-Superzhdet-100 or SSJ-100 plane, flying from Moscow to Murmansk, caught fire. The plane landed on its belly and was engulfed in flames. Despite the efforts of the airport fire and rescue services at the scene of the accident, forty-one people died in the fire and smoke. The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case for violation of safety rules for operating the airliner, and the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) created a commission to investigate the accident.
The degree of emergency is enhanced by the fact that a serious accident occurred not with some Boeing or Airbus, but with a Russian-made airliner that had received all the necessary national and international certificates for operation, with an aircraft that many perceived as a symbol of a new rise domestic civil aviation industry, with good export potential.
Shocked citizens and the media are wondering what caused the tragedy: the technical condition of the plane, the error of the pilots, the miscalculations of the rescuers, or the greedy passengers rushing to save suitcases and trunks from the burning plane?
Such well-known “world-famous experts” as Navalny and Khodorkovsky are especially obsessed with the topic of eliminating “superjets”, having raised a wave about corruption in the Russian civil aircraft industry, unusable spare parts and disgusting repairs of airliners.
With Khodorkovsky, “everything is clear”: the founder and sponsor of the grant-eating office “Open Russia” from the very beginning took as a personal insult the $6,5 billion in lost profits by the Boeing and Airbus corporations due to the import substitution of “superjets” for their short-haul passenger aircraft. Therefore, the SSJ-1oo accident with human casualties became a hot topic for him.
With Navalny, things are much more interesting: the Russian “oppositionist Namba One” joined the board of directors of Aeroflot in 2012 and, probably, that is why he carefully avoids any mention of the air carrier, starting to focus on throwing dirt at the plane and its creators.
The famous journalist Pivovarov, who also happened to be an amateur pilot, posted his expert opinion on YouTube. Having no experience in operating passenger airliners, Pivovarov, in turn, shields the SSJ-1oo and makes it clear that the human factor is to blame for the accident and the death of people.
It is clear that no one wants to be responsible for an accident and, especially, for the death of people, so there is a conflict of interest when interested parties hire employees of information escort services and a tailoring shop for journalistic jeans.
As usual, victory has many fathers, but defeat is always an orphan.
It became known that the developers from the Sukhoi company managed to promote their representatives to the commission to investigate the causes of the accident. Now Aeroflot is trying to pull off the same trick with its ears, since the priority version of the investigation is the guilt of the pilots during the landing, which led to a hard landing and a fire.
Aeroflot is already being accused that the accident was a consequence of “optimization”, which resulted in a reduction in flight hours for crew training and reliance on computer simulators.
Aeroflot supporters recall that the largest Russian air carrier was initially not interested in buying “raw” SSJ-1oo, and now it is forced to experience material and image losses, because in recent days four “superjets” have been withdrawn from flights and for On the day of May 10 alone, 14 paired flights from Moscow were canceled.
Increasingly, some murky authorities are inserted into the showdown around the accident, turning the arrows from the operation of the plane to the emotional plane with “greedy passengers who left the plane with trunks and suitcases.”
Another switchman has been found: the Sheremetyevo fire and rescue service, supposedly so slow that it allowed the fire on the plane to flare up, that the tail section of it turned into a crematorium.
Aviation “reformers”, sometimes belonging to the category of people vested with authority, joined the murky authorities, proposing to correct emergency situations with a new aircraft loading scheme. For example, lock suitcases in special storage rooms and place children separately from their parents. Let the passengers save their children, not their suitcases.
Apparently, all these people are used to flying on personal planes or booking exclusive charters to transport their loved ones, since they do not realize what additional chaos their innovative proposals will cause on a plane in distress.
In general, it seems that the interested parties want not only to throw their opponents down the toilet and gain publicity, but also to hide the investigation behind a thick curtain of information noise.
After reading and listening to people involved in domestic civil aviation, one comes to the understanding that “the truth is somewhere nearby.”
The version about the fault of the human factor is supported by the testimony of Aeroflot employees, indicating the “optimization” of the pilot training program. Many also know from films and fiction that in the event of an emergency, pilots are required to keep the plane in the air until the fuel tanks are completely depleted in order to avoid a fire on the ground. But for some reason the SSJ-1oo pilots did not adhere to this rule.
At the same time, aviation experts suggest paying attention to the reason for the return of the plane to Sheremetyevo Airport - a lightning strike on the airliner.
Lightning strikes on civil aircraft are a fairly common phenomenon, so aviation specialists have long developed measures to nullify the threat to flight safety from celestial electricity. Not a single aircraft without lightning protection will leave the factory.
Information has emerged that imported avionics in the ill-fated “superjet” were damaged by a lightning strike. And without an automatic control system, it is impossible to spin circles in the air until the fuel runs out.
So at least one SSJ-1oo was vulnerable to lightning? What about avionics? I remember that the disgraced Boeing 737 Max-8 was put into a steep dive by its avionics, hitting the ground without being struck by lightning.
It is also proposed to note that the share of Russian localization in “superjets” does not exceed 25% and such important components as avionics, engines, composites and landing gear are imported. It is known, for example, that the SaM146 engines, produced by NPO Saturn together with the French, turned out to be not as good as stated. And “superjets” already had problems with imported chassis.
On the other hand, those attacking the “superjet” claim that the plane caught fire while still in the air, although the full video of the landing shows that after first touching the ground the plane jumped, after which it fell on its belly and caught fire. There is reason to believe that after the first contact with the ground, the landing gear of the “superjet” gave way and broke completely during the second contact. Is there a problem with the strength of imported chassis? What about ours? Would you resist?
Witnesses indicate that the tail section of the SSJ-1oo turned into a crematorium due to the fact that the burning engine continued to operate and pump jet stream into the cabin through the broken windows, although it should have stopped. What is this: control system glitches or pilot error?
Judging by the published biographies of the pilots, the plane was not flown by beginners. The aircraft captain switched to civil aviation after a long service in the FSB aviation.
Emerging information suggests that the shortcomings of the SSJ-1oo are due to the use of a number of imported components in the design of the aircraft and the ensuing problems with the operation of the aircraft and the difficulties of their after-sales service. Now the problem has been exacerbated by Western sanctions. The airliner itself, which underwent full certification according to EU standards before production, is hardly fair to consider a “killing machine.”
Apparently, the “superjet” accident with human losses is explained by an ongoing set of problems that arose back in the “holy nineties” in the Russian civil aviation system, which includes the aviation industry, and the personnel training system, and the privatization of what is necessary and not necessary, and reliance on foreign technologies instead of developing our own. One should not discount the fact that Rostec, on which they are now trying to blame all the dogs for the shortcomings of the “superjet”, took under its wing the United Aircraft Corporation, where the SSJ-1oo suffered, only in 2019, and even with a hole in budget of 300 million rubles.
It is obvious that under strict government control the problem of “superjets” can be solved, although it is difficult to say whether these aircraft have a future. It is quite possible that the accident and difficulties with the supply of components by Western partners due to sanctions will drive the nail into the coffin of the SSJ-1oo. The main thing is that this accident does not become the gravedigger of the revived civil aviation industry.
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