Accident Yak-42 near Trabzon

Yak-42D with registration number UR-42352 (serial number - 4520421811395, serial (serial) number - 08-10) was released on April 7, 1988 at the Saratov Aviation Plant . In operation since April 26, 1988. The total flight time was 18 739 hours and 9700 take-off and landing cycles. In 1997–2000, it belonged to Strezhevsky Airlines ( Strezhevoy, Tomsk Region ). Since April 13, 2000, it belonged to the Ukrainian airline Ukrainian Mediterranean Airlines (Ukrainian-Mediterranean Airlines) ^[1] .

Due to the long route, there was a double cabin crew aboard flight 4230:

• The aircraft commanders are Vladimir Kutsenko and Nikolay Sytnik.
• The co-pilots are Sergey Slatvinsky and Igor Milipyanko.
• Bortmekhaniki - Dmitry Shirokov and Vyacheslav Ferenc.
• Flight attendants :
  • Julia Golovina,
  • Ekaterina Moshkovich,
  • Alexander Yanchenko,
  • Julia Smooth.
• Aerotechnics - Nikolay Gutrin and Evgeny Berezovsky.
• Flight manager - Dmitry Molochko.

The Yak-42 passenger plane made a charter flight from Kabul ( Afghanistan ) to Zaragoza ( Spain ) with intermediate landings for refueling in Bishkek ( Kyrgyzstan ) and Trabzon ( Turkey ). When landing at Trabzon Airport, the plane collided with a mountainside at an altitude of 1400 meters ^[2] .

All 75 people aboard were killed: 62 Spanish troops, 12 crew members and 1 flight manager.

Passengers of the aircraft were 40 military personnel of the sapper unit of the elite armored division Brunete, 21 military personnel of the Spanish Air Force serving the Spanish air group in Afghanistan, and one agent of the civil guard (paramilitary police); all of them served for four months as part of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan . Among the dead were: one lieutenant colonel, four majors, six captains, five lieutenants (a total of 18 officers), 33 corporals and 11 privates ^{[3] [4]} .

Onboard there were 12 crew members (on board there was a shift crew, that is, there were two crews of 6 people on board), who were citizens of Ukraine, and one citizen of Belarus was a fly manager.

A commission investigating the circumstances of the disaster consisting of six people (3 from Turkey, one each from Russia, Ukraine, Spain) studied the circumstances of the disaster for 2.5 years. In the final report, 14 reasons were identified: crew fatigue (at the time of the crash, the crew was in flight for 23 hours without rest ^[5] ), lack of fuel, lack of flight experience in difficult weather conditions, the airline did not provide pilots with sufficient information about the characteristics of the airport in Trabzon, failure to conduct the necessary inspection of the aircraft before its departure from Kabul and others ^[6] .

The Spanish Parliament Defense Commission recognized Minister of Defense Federico Trillo as responsible for the deaths of Spanish soldiers in a plane crash, as he did not organize the necessary inspection of the leased plane, he was also found guilty of incorrect actions in identifying the bodies of dead military personnel, as well as of incorrect treatment of their relatives ^[7] .

In 2003, an error occurred while identifying the bodies of the dead, in 2004 relatives of the victims found out about this, in November 2004 it was decided to exhume the bodies and identify them using DNA analysis. In January 2005, the bodies were reburied under their original names. The Prosecutor of the National Court of Justice of Spain accused the retired divisional general Vicente Navarro of forgery, as he mixed up the bodies of the dead ^[8] .

• in Spain, two-day mourning was declared.
• On May 26, 2004, a monument was unveiled at the crash site, on which the names of all the victims of the disaster are inscribed ^[9] .
• On July 24, 2006, a monument to the dead crew of the Yak-42 was unveiled in the town of Machka ^[10] .
• A monument on which the names of all the victims of the Yak-42 crash are inscribed is also in the city of Zaragoza (Spain) on the Paseo de la Constitution.