A Russian flight navigator was drunk on vodka when the plane he was guiding crashed and killed 47 people, including a team of scientists who had been helping Iran with nuclear secrets, it has been revealed.
The RusAir jet slammed into a motorway near Petrozavodsk airport just minutes before it was to land on June 20 – only five people survived.
Now Russia’s aviation authority has said alcohol and heavy fog both contributed to the fatal incident after ruling out a technical malfunction on the Tu-134 plane.
In its report the Interstate Aviation Committee said cooperation among the crew during the disastrous landing attempt was poor, with the pilot handing control to the drunk navigator, while the co-pilot was effectively excluded.
On some models of the Tu-134, such as the 31-year-old one that crashed, there is a navigator position in the glass-covered nose of the plane.
But the report said a major factor in the crash was: ‘The use during the flight of a navigator in a light level of alcoholic intoxication.’
On Sunday, state television channel Rossiya said experts believe the navigator had consumed about a glass of vodka shortly before the flight took off from Moscow.
Conspiracy theories about the doomed flight started after it emerged the five Russian scientists had worked at the controversial Bushehr nuclear plant on the Iranian Persian Gulf.
Due to open this year, the nuclear facility has been worked on since 1975, and has raised international concerns that it may be used to covertly build nuclear weapons for Iran.
But despite the controversial project, Russia still believe that it was poor weather and pilot error that caused the crash rather than foul play.
When it crashed the approach had been too low, and it clipped a tree and then hit a high-power line - causing the airport's runway lights to go off for 10 seconds - before crashing into the ground, the report said.
Local people pulled survivors from the burning wreckage, but it is thought that the drunk navigator was one of the dead.
At the time air traffic control said it had ordered the crew to abort the landing when the runway lights went off, but it was already too late.
The runway's high-intensity lighting - which is supposed to be deployed at times of low visibility - had also failed, according to Alexei Morozov - deputy head of the Interstate Aviation Committee.
The plane was carrying 52 people, including nine crew members. Russian Premier League football referee Vladimir Pettay and a Swedish citizen were among those killed.
Enlarge Russia plane crash
Russia and other former Soviet republics have some of the world's worst air traffic safety records, according to the International Air Transport Association.
Experts have blamed weak government controls, poor pilot training and a cost-cutting mentality for the poor safety record, with alarming numbers of emergency landings reported.
Polish president Lech Kaczynski was among 96 people killed when his Tu-154 crashed in heavy fog while trying to land near the western city of Smolensk in April 2010.
In 2006, three crashes - two in Russia and one in Ukraine - killed more than 400 people.
The Tu-134, along with its larger sibling the Tu-154, has been the workhorse of Soviet and Russian civil aviation since the 1960s - with more than 800 planes built.
Earlier this month a top Russian ice hockey team were killed when the aircraft they were in crashed on a river bank.
The plane was leaving the city, north of Moscow and on the Volga River about 150 miles from the capital, and was due to fly to Minsk in Belarus.
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