Whipping winds focus of inquiry into airline crash
MOSCOW — Winds were gusting before dawn Saturday over the airport in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don when a plane carrying 62 people from a Russian holiday destination decided to abort its landing.
The timing was tricky. Two planes had landed just a few minutes before the FlyDubai plane aimed to touch down. But a Russian Aeroflot plane scheduled to land around the same time made three attempts at landing before diverting to another airport, according to Flightradar24, an aviation website.
The FlyDubai pilots chose to put their Boeing 737-800 into a holding pattern, circling for two hours over the city 37 miles from the Ukraine border. But when they did finally try to land, something went catastrophically wrong. The plane plummeted to Earth and exploded in a huge fireball, killing everyone on board.
Grainy video footage, apparently from a security camera near the airport that was posted on Russian websites, showed a plane streaking toward the ground at a steep angle, then exploding. The powerful explosion left a large crater in the airport’s runway and pulverized the plane. Investigators said they quickly recovered both flight recorders.
The cause of the crash wasn’t immediately known, but officials and experts pointed at a sudden gust of wind as a possible reason.
“By all appearances, the cause of the air crash was the strongly gusting wind, ap- proaching a hurricane level,” said Vasily Golubev, governor of the Rostov region 600 miles south of Moscow.
According to weather data reported by Russian state television, when the FlyDubai plane first tried to land, the winds at ground level weren’t dangerously strong, but at an altitude of 1,640 feet and higher they reached a near-hurricane speed of around 67 mph. Later, when the plane crashed, winds near the surface reached 49 mph and could have been even stronger at altitude.
“It was an uncontrollable fall,” veteran Russian pilot Sergei Kruglikov said on state television. He said a sudden change in wind speed and direction could have caused the wings to abruptly lose their lifting power.
FlyDubai CEO Ghaith al-- Ghaith said the pilots hadn’t issued any distress call and hadn’t attempted to divert to an alternate airport.
The 55 passengers, 44 of them Russian, ranged in age from 4 to 67; eight others were from Ukraine, two were from India and one from Uzbekistan. The crew of seven included two Spaniards and one person each from Cyprus, Colombia, Russia, the Seychelles and Kyrgyzstan.