Russia appears to have shot down Azerbaijan flight

Amid conflicting reports, a disturbing possibility emerges

Awful news out of Kazakhstan this morning, an airliner carrying 67 people on board crashed Christmas morning apparently while trying to land near the airport at Aktau on the Caspian Sea. At least 38 people are reported to have died at this point.

Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-B243, an Embraer 190 regional jet, had departed from Baku in Azerbaijan on a short hop to Grozny, in Chechnya, part of Russia.

What exactly happened is extremely unclear at this early stage, so everything I’m going to say is provisional and we simply can’t jump to any conclusions yet, but I wanted to give you a preliminary lay of the land.

According to Russian news agencies, the flight was rerouted from Grozny to Aktau in Kazakhstan to fog in Grozny.

Then when it was coming in to land, it hit a flock of geese, lost its engines, and crashed.

However, there’s reason to doubt these claims.

First, weather data from Grozny that’s been posted to the PPrrune forum shows that there was no fog in Grozny.

And it really doesn’t look like the plane hit a flock of geese. Here’s ADS-B data posted by FlightRadar42 on Twitter.

It seems to show the plane climbing, crusing along at altitude, descending to land, and then suddenly losing a lot altitude before climbing and diving wildly for over an hour.

Here’s the flight path from that ADS-B data.

It looks like for a significant part of the flight the plane was not transmitting ADS-B location data or it was blocked, not clear at this point, but then when it appears over the Caspian Sea heading to Aktau its flying in a very erratic pattern. Why would it fly like this?

Well, images of the wreckage posted to Telegram show what look like shrapnel in the tail area.

Another relevant piece of information is that, according to Ukrainian news sources Ukrainian drones had attacked Grozny, which remember is part of Russia. Ukrainians have been conducting drone strikes across wide swathes of Russia.

So, at this early stage, it looks like what might have happened is that in the wake of this UAV strike overeager antiaircraft missile operators might have taken a shot at a civilian airliner, causing enough damage to the tail area that the pilots really struggled to maintain control. They then fled Russian airspace to seek safety across the Caspian Sea, but were unable to overcome their control issues to get the plane safely on the ground.

Again, this is just speculation at this point, based on very early and incomplete information. I’ll update this post with more information as it comes in.

UPDATE: Russian-language news channel Rain adding to speculation that the flight was shot down by the Russians:

Meanwhile, military analyst Yan Matveev, who studied the video with holes on the liner's lining, called the probable version with a Russian air force hit on the plane.

“The holes on the tail feather really look like the impact of the striking elements of an anti-aircraft missile. I'm somewhat bothered by their dispersion and the small amount in general. In addition, large anti-missiles usually attack aircraft from the front hemisphere. Here we are talking about an attack from the tail," - he writes.

Matveyev notes that today Chechnya was attacked by Ukrainian drones (the destruction of drones, in particular, was reported on his social networks by the Secretary of the Chechnya Union, nephew of Ramzan Kadyrov Hamzat Kadyrov). According to Matveev, the "Armor-C1" complex could have been used when reflecting a UFO attack.

Russian Aviation and Azerbaijan Airline previously called the main version of the crash a collision with birds. Orda publication reported that a balloon "exploded" in the plane."

UPDATE: In his video on the crash YouTuber “Pilot Blog” shows footage of the remnants of a Pantsir air-defence missile photographed today in Grozny.

He raises an excellent question: If Russians were on high air-defence alert because they feared further Ukrainian drone strikes, why didn’t they close the airspace to civilian traffic?

UPDATE December 26, 2024: In a move that is likely related to the Grozny shoot-down, Russia has closed five airports in the country “citing safety concerns.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve realized that, if you suspect enemy drones are inbound and you want to shoot at them, you’d better maker sure no civilian planes are flying around in the area.