Early Christmas morning, an Embraer regional jet took off from Baku, Azerbaijan, which is on a peninsula extending from the middle of the western coast of the Caspian Sea. It is also the capital of Azerbaijan, a small country squeezed between Iran to the south and Russia to the north. Flight 8243 was headed to the provincial Russian capital of Grozny, and the normal route from Baku to Grozny lay along the eastern shoreline of the Caspian Sea.
But things were not normal in Grozny. In addition to heavy fog, Grozny was undergoing intermittent drone attacks as a part of the war with Ukraine. Russian forces were deployed in the area and equipped with surface-to-air missiles. Russian military personnel were also using electronic countermeasures that disable and falsify GPS data that airliners normally use for navigation.
Around half an hour into the short flight, the pilot had to switch to a more rudimentary type of guidance control than GPS due to this interference. Shortly after getting permission to land at Grozny, something happened to make the pilot change his mind about landing there. Passengers later reported hearing loud bangs at the time. Thinking initially he had suffered a bird strike, the pilot reported loss of control and began asking about weather at other nearby airports. Almost simultaneously, Russian authorities implemented a "closed-skies" order over Grozny, but Flight 8243 was already there.
External data indicates the plane then diverted from its intended path toward the east, ultimately flying across the Caspian Sea, which took nearly an hour. The pilot activated an emergency signal on the plane's transponder, equivalent to a modern-day SOS, and requested an emergency landing at Aktau, Kazakhstan, on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea. His hydraulic systems were failing by this time, making control of the plane extremely difficult. He managed to lower the landing gear and circled the Aktau airport in an attempt to land. But his radio went out and the plane crashed about 3 km short of the airport, breaking into two pieces. The nose section caught fire, but the tail section landed upside down and remained largely intact. There were 29 survivors, including two crew members and two children, but all the survivors suffered injuries, some of them life-threatening.
News images of the plane showed what looked like bullet holes in the fuselage, consistent with an attack on the plane by an antiaircraft missile such as the Russian Pantsir-S1, which uses fragmentation munitions that throw shrapnel over a wide area. On Saturday, Dec. 28, Russian president Vladimir Putin apologized for the "tragic incident" but stopped short of taking responsibility for the accident.
Investigation of the crash continues, but from what we know now the sequence of events is fairly clear. By virtue of drone attacks in its airspace, Grozny is in a war zone. Flying into a war zone is a risky business, but at the time the Azerbaijan flight took off, there were no formal warnings extant closing Grozny's airspace. Antiaircraft installations such as the Pantsir-S1 rely on low-frequency radar, which can give a general idea of the size of a target but nothing too specific. If a nervous antiaircraft crew was waiting in a fog for a drone target and saw something show up on radar, it is at least understandable that they might choose to fire at it, although there are lots of good reasons not to. That seems to be what happened . Once the plane sustained damage to its tail section, the pilots gradually learned the extent of damage as they realized it wasn't birds, but something more serious.
As hydraulic fluid leaked out, they would have experienced gradual loss of control and reverted to using throttle thrust to steer the plane. The late pilots deserve credit for making it all the way across the Caspian Sea, because ditching the plane in the water might have made it hard for anyone to survive. As it happened, almost half the passengers and two crew members made it out alive. For those airline travelers of us who envy first-class passengers near the front of the plane, it is some rueful comfort to note that most if not all of the survivors were in the rear half that broke off.
Since the accident, several countries, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkistan, and Israel have banned flights into various Russian cities, citing safety concerns. This is belated recognition that the war in Ukraine has spread through Russia in a way that no one anticipated at the start, and is yet another cost of war.
Other things being equal, wars are to be avoided. But if a country is at war, what restrictions should be placed on domestic and international air travel? Civilian deaths during wartime have been a part of war since the beginning, but the scale of air travel means that one mistake can cause hundreds of deaths. News reports recalled the fate of Malaysian Airlines flight 17, which crashed in 2014, killing all 298 people aboard when Moscow-backed Ukranian separatists shot it down over eastern Ukraine.
One searches in vain for a technological solution to such problems. Deliberately targeting for destruction a commercial airliner of a foreign nation is a heinous act tantamount to terrorism, and it is not clear that the Azerbaijan crash resulted from a deliberate attack. Given the circumstances of fog, it is more likely a case of mistaken identity, and Russia has launched a criminal investigation of the incident. That may or may not throw more light on the situation.
But in the meantime, it is pretty clear that anyone flying anywhere near locations in either Russia or Ukraine where missile or drone attacks have happened is taking a large chance, much larger than the usual risks of air travel, which are infinitesimal under peacetime conditions.
The crowning irony is that this accident happened on Christmas Day, the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace. A writer named Paul Kingsnorth recently made the news by giving a speech entitled "Against Christian Civilization." His point was that while Christ urged peace, the Western phenomenon known as Christian civilization has perfected the art of war better than any other civilization in history.
We live in a fallen world, and as long as there are bad actors, good actors sometimes need to do harsh things. And people make mistakes. Honor goes to the pilots of Flight 8249 who saved many of their passengers under horrible conditions, and sympathy to the loved ones left behind.
Sources: I referred to Associated Press articles on the crash at https://apnews.com/article/azerbaijan-airliner-crash-aktau-kazakstan-embraer-872800d95273ee96e0950192a32e5228 and https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-plane-crash-azerbaijan-a5b0ffa3e410df53556b0cd824f32a6f, as well as the Wikipedia article "Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243." Paul Kingsnorth's talk in its published form can be accessed at https://www.firstthings.com/article/2025/01/against-christian-civilization.
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