Azerbaijan Airlines Flight A-56

Azerbaijan Airlines Flight A-56 was a scheduled domestic passenger flight operated by Azerbaijan Airlines, from Nakhchivan Airport to Baku, which crashed whilst attempting an emergency landing on 5 December 1995, killing 52 out of the 82 people on board. The twin-engine aircraft operating the flight, a Tupolev Tu-134, experienced an engine failure shortly after take-off, but the second engine that was operable was shut down in error. The pilots attempted a forced landing, which resulted in the aircraft crashing in the south-western outskirts of Nakhchivan, 3.85 km from the airport runway.

Crash

The aircraft took off from Nakhchivan at 17:52 local time. At an altitude of 60 m and an airspeed of 317 km/h, the no. 1 engine failed. The co-pilot Sergey Kuliyev, who was at the controls, responded by countering the left bank, but five seconds later the flight engineer Alexander Sokolov reported, in error, that the no. 2 engine had failed. The captain Eduard Hasanov took over control of the aircraft. However, because the co-pilot had countered the left bank, the captain did not have the sensory information which could have alerted him that it was the no. 1 engine that had failed. The aircraft continued to climb. The captain then ordered the no. 2 engine to be shut down. The flight engineer retarded the right throttle and noticed that the power on the working engine was decreasing, he then pushed the no. 2 throttle back to full power, but the no. 2 engine had already stopped. Eight seconds later, the flight engineer reported that both engines had failed. The aircraft climbed to an altitude of 197 m, while the speed had decreased to 290 km/h. The captain decided to make an emergency landing, but encountered an apartment block and made a sharp right turn to avoid it. The aircraft crashed into a field with a 37-degree right bank and a sink rate of 10 m/s. Thirty people out of eighty-two on board survived the accident (twenty-six passengers and four crew members).