Back to the crashed Flight J28243:
Flightradar24 has put out a
probable flight path for part of the time the Embraer could not send valid position data, based on the Heading and Indicated Airspeed readings that it did transmit via ADS-B data. Look for the map below "Annotated and inferred flight path" here:
An Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer E190 crashed near Aktau on 25 December.
www.flightradar24.com
Map:
https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/...-Flight-Path-J28243-Flightradar24-scaled.jpeg
So here is the timeline (UTC)
03:55 Takeoff from Baku; path goes along the Caspian Sea coast.
04:25 Last valid position transmitted, as plane has just crossed the beach into Russian land near Makhatshkala.
04:37 Plane appears to go have gone straight and normal for another 12 minutes, but now data becomes unusable.
FR25 says that GPS interferrence is common in the area, and it is not unusual for planes flying in areas with jammed GPS to be sending degraded and corrupt data.
05:13 (36 minutes later) FR24's inferred flight path resumes South of Grosny, going North and soon flying a 360° loop counterclockwise before going North again, passing Grosny airport by. The runway there goes west-east. At no point is flight J28243 lined up with the runway, so apparently no attempted landing during that time frame (there may have been attempts earlier)
05:25 North of Grosny airport, the flight turns East and appears to be heading straight for Aqtau on the other side of the Caspian Sea. Notice the straight path for several minutes.
05:37 The plane had drifted towards a more Northerly course, and now again turns East. From here on out until crash-landing, the path is wobbly and erratic.
Here is my interpretation:
Until 04:37, all is fine. I conjecture that flying with wrong GPS position is business as usual for the pilots
However, flight appears to have trouble finding or landing at Grosny for reasons not clear yet - a combination of GPS jamming/spoofing, fog on the ground and incompetence all around is certainly in play. However, plane appears to be controllable still.
Decision to divert to Aqtau then is based on Grosny not being fit for landing. But why not back to Baku? Does the crew depend on better visibility because of some unknown problem at this point? Unclear.
The ca. 8 minutes of straight flight from 05:25, followed by a rest of the flight with ever changing heading, suggests that controllability was (suddenly?) compromised at ca. 05:33, when the plane was over the Russian republic of Dagestan (coincidentally near a village named "Rossya" ("Russia").
This scenario suggests to me two possible time frames when the plane was shot at and damaged by some SAM:
a) Either prior to 05:13 while trying to approach Grosny airport. Pilots may have lost some of their ability to navigate by sight or by instrument (or both), but the bad flight control issue only developed later; perhaps some tecnical system was damaged in a way that it kept working for 15 more minutes, then failed; I am thinking something like a leakage of hydraulic fluids, or an electrical engine running hotter and hutter until failing.
b) SAM struck over Dagestan as plane was already heading for Aqtau. Although I am not sure why there would be SAMs in that particular area. Peraps to protect the Makhatshkala area?
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Grosny and the larger Russian North Kaukasus area has been under Ukrainian attack not for the first or second time this Christmas. As FR24 points out, GPS has been out "commonly" in recent times. Surely, protocols are in place on how to deal with civilian traffic. I wonder:
Has the reroute to Aqtau been done before? Perhaps even routinely?
Or if this was the first time, perhaps SAM operators in Dagestan did not expect a civilian plane to come from the West (whence more typically, perhaps, Ukrainian vessels would approach) and thus considered it to be hostile?
Did J28243 actually experience trouble with fog and/or birds, and then additionally got struck by a SAM ("if you think you had a bad day at work...")
Whole affair seems to to be a confluence of three or more factors.
We'll find out from the data and voice recorders.