The An-70 airplane on a Kyiv- Omsk-Yakutsk flight crash-landed the Saturday before last. Four minutes after takeoff its two port engines failed one after the other, leaving the crew no alternative but to make a forced landing at the Omsk Airport in Russia. While landing, the plane’s tail was damaged. Four men were injured; two of them, including one in a critical condition, were hospitalized. The other two were treated on the spot.
The aircraft carried 33 citizens of Ukraine: 11 crew members and 33 technical-supervision experts. The plane was bound for Yakutia to be tested under low temperatures. The causes of the accident are being investigated. Russia’s RTR television news, quoting a representative of the Omsk Oblast Administration, reported that experts believe one of the possible causes might be the crystallization of kerosene at a low temperature (weathermen report the night frost in Omsk approached -20C). The Omsk security service laboratory is examining the fuel the plane was filled with.
The Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) will not take part in investigating the causes of engine failure on the An-70 plane which made an emergency landing at an Omsk airport because it classifies what happened as an air accident without loss of human life, the IAC told Interfax, quoting the decision of the committee chairperson Tatiana Anodina. The IAC added that investigation into this air accident would be carried out by Rosaviakosmos.
The An-70 aircraft is equipped with four D-27 gas-turbine engines developed at Zaporizhzhia’s Academician Ivchenko Mechanical Engineering Design Bureau and manufactured at the Zaporizhzhia-based Motor Sich Plant. Meanwhile, Motor Sich chief designer Yuri Basov said that “the plant had not assembled or tested the D-27 engines installed on the An-70 plane that crashed in Omsk,” UNIAN reports. The agency states that these engines were designed and assembled manually at the Zaporizhzhia-based Progress State Machine Building Design Bureau. However, engine assembly specialists claim the accident occurred due to the crystallization of fuel, not the poor quality of the engines.
The plane’s chief designer Vasyl Teplov, employed at the Antonov Research and Production Association (Kyiv), said the Omsk accident with the Ukrainian An-70 would not affect further serial production of this medium transport aircraft. A government resolution calls for the building of 65 An-70 planes for Ukraine and 164 for Russia in 2002-2018 at Kyiv’s Aviant Factory, Last October the plane successfully passed the first stage of its official certification flight test program. The check of stability, controllability, and other characteristics confirmed theoretical calculations: the An-70’s installed capacities make this plane completely safe under all flight conditions and meet all requirements. The crew had worked for hundreds of hours at a flight-simulation test bench. Experts believe that, although the machine had not yet been tested in Far North conditions, the Omsk emergency was not caused by the plane’s lack of preparedness for these climatic conditions.
The Antonov Association spokesman Oleksandr Kyva told The Day’s Petro IZHYK that a commission of Ukrainian experts had flown to Omsk, but so far there is no information about what caused the accident. “We will try to ensure that the accident has a minimal if any effect on further market opportunities for this Ukrainian- Russian plane,” Mr. Kyva said.
Meanwhile, Dnipropetrovsk will host in the first half of February a routine meeting between Presidents Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The main item on the agenda will be further expansion of Ukrainian-Russian aerospace cooperation. Recently, on January 27, Mr. Kuchma instructed the prime minister to take measures to intensify Ukrainian-Russian cooperation in his field, following his visit to Russia on December 22 last. In particular, the government, assisted by the Russian side, should accelerate implementation of the An-70 and Tu-334 program. It simultaneously became known that the Ukraine’s president will soon sign a decree endorsing a concept on the recovery of the space industry and instructing that it form “a single technological space, which will make it possible to work on both civilian and military projects.”
