© Guillermo Granja / Reuters
The Flydubai FZ981 crash in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, could have followed the
pilots' failure to manage the landing after taking control of the system, media reveal citing flight data. The final minutes are said to have been
full of arguments and screams of terror.Now that decoding of the flight data recorders of the crashed Boeing is complete, an unnamed source told Russian daily
Kommersant that
pilot error is now dominating the investigation as the probable cause. It appears that
while trying to gain altitude after an unsuccessful landing attempt in bad weather, one of the pilots pulled the control stick up too much, causing a stall break and an uncontrollable nosedive.The Interstate Aviation Committee believes that the official results of the decoding will be made public within a week or two. Meanwhile, according to Kommersant's sources, the recorder revealed that
flight FZ981 had made two attempts to land in automatic mode, and since a veering squall wind hampered the second attempt, the pilot decided to make a third approach for landing in manual mode. One of the pilots pressed the TOGA (Take off. Go around) button and turned off the autopilot, writes the daily.
Anonymous experts
Kommersant talked to believe the pilot
did not manage the diving rudder and horizontal stabilizer, which steer the plane in opposite directions - down and up, respectively. When the pilot pulled up, he
put both the rudder and stabilizer in a sharp climb mode, somewhat fighter-jet style, plus enacted the TOGA regime's retracted flaps, decreasing ascending force. As a result, the
aircraft lost speed and got into the beyond-stall angle of approach. All this led to an uncontrollable dive, the experts believe.
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