Tu-104 crash near Ust-Ordynsky

The Tu-104 crash near Ust-Ordynsky was an aviation accident that occurred on 20 October 1960 near Ust-Orda. A Tu-104A airliner of the Khabarovsk Joint Air Detachment of Aeroflot was operating scheduled domestic flight SU-005 on the route Moscow — Omsk — Irkutsk — Khabarovsk; however, because of difficult weather conditions at Irkutsk Airport the aircraft diverted to the alternate at Ust-Ordynsky, but during the landing approach the aircraft collided with a power line and was destroyed. 3 people out of 68 (61 passengers and 7 crew members) were killed; another 19 were injured.

Crash

At night, at 15:58 Moscow time (20:58 local time), aircraft 42406 landed at Ust-Orda, and its crew informed the crew of aircraft 42452 that it was snowing at the airport, the cloud base was 200—250 metres and visibility was 3 kilometres. After this, Tu-104 aircraft 42452 began its landing approach, and after passing the outer marker at a height of 800 metres the landing gear was extended. Then, between the outer and inner markers, the aircraft descended below the clouds and the crew switched on the landing lights. But at this point the flight engineer reported that the nose gear extension light was not lit, meaning that the nose gear leg had either not locked or had not extended at all. The captain then decided to abandon the landing and go around, and therefore increased engine power. However, when the airliner approached the runway threshold, the flight engineer expressed the opinion that the bulb might simply have burned out. Wrongly taking this information as confirmation that the nose gear had in fact extended, the captain immediately decided to land and began to reduce engine power, but, changing his mind, increased it again in order to go around and check the condition of the nose gear while airborne. Then, at a height of 10—15 metres above the runway and 2 kilometres from its threshold, the aircraft began a climbing left turn. But having turned the airliner 70° relative to the runway axis, the captain unexpectedly saw the ground directly ahead, so he pulled the control column "towards himself" and set the engines to takeoff power (maximum).

At 16:14 Moscow time (21:14 local time) the Tu-104, at a height of 52 metres, struck power line wires. Having lost speed, it went into a left bank and crashed on all three extended landing gear legs onto the slope of a hill 52 metres high relative to the aerodrome level, with a slope gradient of 30—35°. After sliding 650 metres across the ground, the airliner caught fire and subsequently burned out completely. The navigator, flight engineer and radio operator were killed in the crash. The remaining 4 crew members (the pilots and flight attendants), as well as 15 passengers, were injured.