IL-12 catastrophe near Zugdidi

Il-12P with the registration number of the USSR-L1375 (factory - 30103, serial - 103) was released on September 28, 1947 by the Banner of Labor plant ( Moscow ). The airliner was handed over to the General Directorate of the civil air fleet , which, in turn, sent it to the 112th (Tbilisi) joint aviation squad of the Georgian Territorial Administration of the civil air fleet. The total flight time of the aircraft was 3204 hours ^{[1] [2]} .

• Aircraft commander - Bozhenko N.I.
• Co - pilot - Khakhutashvili I.I.
• Mechanic - Lebedev M.I.
• Navigator - Cherepanov V.A.
• Short- tempered instructor - Lominadze G.V.
• Beretradist - Koguashvili M.I.

The plane served a passenger flight 229 on the route Moscow - Rostov-on-Don - Tbilisi and at 05:20 flew from Vnukovo airport . The flight to Rostov passed without deviations, after which the plane flew to Tbilisi. According to the documents on board were 10 passengers and 6 crew members, that is only 16 people. But later it will be established that in fact there were two more illegal passengers aboard: the eight-year-old daughter of the chief engineer of the Georgian territorial administration of the civil air fleet, boarded in Moscow, and the co-pilot of the aircraft also boarded in Rostov-on-Don -2, also from this control ^[1] .

On the route section from Krasnodar to Sukhumi there were thunderstorms, and therefore at 10:48 the board L1375 made an unscheduled stop at the Pashkovsky airport in Krasnodar. When the thunderstorms on the stretch to Sukhumi stopped, the crew, after getting acquainted with the weather at 15:02, flew from Krasnodar to Tbilisi. At 16:02, performing a visual flight at the echelon of 2400 meters, the plane entered the zone of the Tbilisi control of the regional dispatching service. At 16:17 flight 229 flew over the airport of Sukhumi, about which the crew handed over to the traffic control service of the airport, and at 16:23 it already passed the exit from the airport's air zone. At 16:31, a dispatcher in Tbilisi was reported from board L1375 that Sukhumi was passed at 16:17, and now the plane follows between the layers of clouds. After that, the crew did not get in touch and did not answer the calls. Soon, the completely destroyed aircraft was found exactly on the flight route on a forested hillside on the territory of the Beria state farm, near the village of Grigorishi and 15 kilometers northeast of the city of Zugdidi . All 18 people on board died, while two passengers fell out at a low altitude ^[1] . At that time it was the largest aviation accident on the territory of Georgia.

• Nato Vachnadze (born 1 (14) June 1904 ) was a Soviet Georgian actress, People’s Artist of the Georgian SSR, Honored Artist of the RSFSR .

Investigation

As it was established by the commission, thunderstorms on the Krasnodar-Sukhumi highway, due to which flight 229 was forced to make an unplanned stop in Krasnodar, were observed from 7 to 13 hours. Further, thunderstorms have already begun to appear on different parts of the Sukhumi- Kutaisi - Surami highway, and they arose fairly quickly. In particular, at 16:15 a thunderstorm was observed near Zugdidi, and at 17:30, already in Kutaisi. The AMSG issued a weather forecast, according to which a thunderstorm was announced from 16:00 to 19:00 on the road section from Sukhumi to Tbilisi, and a thunderstorm was expected on the section Mikha-Tskhakai -Kutaisi. However, the head of the flights at the Sukhumi airport did not give due attention to the fact that the weather conditions from Sukhumi to Kutaisi deteriorated and allowed the IL-12 plane to fly through the airport zone and continue to fly to Tbilisi ^[1] .

According to the testimony of local residents, in the area of ​​the incident, as indicated in the forecast, there was a strong thunderstorm with hail and heavy rain, with frequent lightning strikes. The crew did not expect a thunderstorm, so getting into it was a complete surprise. There is a possibility that the lightning hit the plane, while partially hitting the crew, after which the airliner that was out of control either went into a dive or an uncontrolled fall. However, in the process of descending, the crew managed to recover and tried to prevent a collision with the ground, for which, at an altitude of about 300 meters, dramatically pulled the steering wheels "towards themselves", that is, forcing the plane to raise its nose. But in the course of this maneuver, an overload appeared that exceeded the critical one, after which both wings of the wing were torn off in the region of 9-14 ribs (the outer part, up to the engines). Having lost significant parts of the wing, the plane could no longer continue flying, so the fuselage with the engines running went into a vertical fall and fell to the ground with a stone, as a result of which it collapsed and burned out. The separated parts of the wing fell 120 meters from it and 50 meters from each other ^[1] .

Conclusion

The commission came to the conclusion that the immediate cause of the crash was an unexpected hitting of thunderstorms for its crew. This was facilitated by violations in the work of the flight manager at the Sukhumi airport, who knew that the weather situation on the flight route had deteriorated significantly, but did not require the L1375 board to land at his airport, instead allowing him to fly through the airfield zone. did not report the danger of thunderstorms on the highway. Further, the dispatcher in Sukhumi, having contacted colleagues in the district center of Tbilisi, did not inform them that he had allowed the flight, and also did not ask them for instructions on the further flight of this liner. There were also violations in the work of the flight manager in Tbilisi, who did not know the actual weather conditions on the route from Sukhumi to Tbilisi, and did not need to demand from the Tbilisi AMSG to make him a weather forecast for this part of the route. At the same time, he knew that already two flights were delayed due to bad weather conditions. Flight 229 was given only a formal permission to enter the zone of the district dispatching service of Tbilisi at the echelon of 2400 meters and according to the rules of visual flight , after which no guidance was given on this flight. In Tbilisi itself, there was a poor relationship between the flight director and the AMSG meteorological station, which at the last did not know about the upcoming flights of airplanes of the Tbilisi dispatcher service area of ​​responsibility, while the air traffic controllers, in turn, received data on actual weather and storm warnings ^{[ 1]} .

The heads of the flights of the Sukhumi and Tbilisi airports, as well as the head of the Sukhumi airport, who could, but did not prohibit flight 229 from the airfield zone, were named the culprits of the disaster ^[1] .