Disaster over Syvash

The Syvash tragedy of 1978: the crash of the passenger airliner AN-24.

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Valeriy Verkhovsky. "Krymska Svitlytsia" newspaper, 2018, issue No. 43

Forty years ago, a tragedy occurred in Crimea. As a result of a plane crash, 26 people died: the crew and passengers of the An-24 aircraft, which was operating flight 6515 from Stavropol to Lviv, with intermediate stops in Simferopol and Chisinau.

The plane took off from Stavropol on October 23, 1978, at six o'clock in the evening. Over the Stavropol and Krasnodar regions, the flight proceeded without problems, and nothing foreshadowed trouble. However, already on the approach to the Kerch Peninsula, a solid cloud cover appeared in front of the aircraft, and bypassing its front turned out to be unrealistic. For a quarter of an hour, the pilots flew the plane in the clouds, after which a message was sent to the ground about icing, and a significant one at that. However, aviators constantly encounter icing at altitude and know how to handle it. This time, several negative factors coincided.

An-24 aircraft

At 19:40, the left engine failed, and three seconds later, the right one failed as well. The pilots could still have tried to land the plane in glider mode, as several suitable runways were located nearby — military airfields: Bagherove, Kirovske, Dzhankoy, Hvardiiske. The history of world civil aviation also knows many examples of pilots landing a plane on water (even in the middle of the ocean) and thereby saving the passengers.

The plane was already practically uncontrollable, and near the village of Omelianivka in the Nyzhniohirskyi district, it crashed into the Syvash at an angle of 50° and at high speed... No one survived.

As the investigation into the circumstances of the crash established, the main cause was that the crew did not turn on the heating of the engine air intakes in time. When the machine entered dense clouds, it was too late to do so.