Although preliminary reports said that engine failure brought down the Tupolev-154 aircraft that crashed at Domodedovo Airport on Saturday, reports from the pilot suggests the crash was caused by engineers omitting to put anti-freeze in the engines.
“I am almost 100 per cent sure that they forgot to pour ‘Arctic,’ a kind of anti-freeze, into the engines,” said Agamed Shamalov, the pilot of the Tu-154 to Russian news wire. “That is why one after the other, things went wrong.”
However investigators have continued to blame the pour safety record of the ageing, Soviet-era aircraft type, while also suggesting pilot error could have been to blame. The pilot has stated that the two deaths were caused despite the efforts of the crew. “Let them say what they want,” said Shamalov. “We’re not dead, that is the main thing. It will not be so easy to blame us.”
South East Airlines, or Dagestan Air, has also been criticised for the poor safety procedures and passengers have compared the airline’s aircraft to budget railways carriages and refer to them as “deathtraps”.