Asadov Zulfuqar, a flight attendant who survived the crash of the Embraer plane on December 25 belonging to AZAL airline, shared what happened with the aircraft. Currently in the hospital, Asadov told journalists that the plane made two approaches to Grozny airport but was unable to land.
"On the third approach, we felt an external impact on the plane. Passengers panicked, and we started calming them down. Immediately after that, we felt a second impact, and I felt pain in my forearm. It was a fragment that seriously wounded me, and I began to lose blood. After that, there was another explosion that both we and the passengers felt," he said.
The flight attendant said that the captain decided to fly to another airport, but the nearest cities did not accept the plane, and it had to fly to Aktau.
"Initially, the captain planned to land the plane on water, but then decided to land on land, and it was clear that it would be a hard landing."
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These testimonies from the living witness finally confirm that the plane was shot at, and the holes in its fuselage are the result of three rocket impacts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2TpF0nlPEw
That doesn't make this any less strange. For one thing _three_ Pantsir hits would definitely have downed the plane. If the plane was not shot at during the first two approaches, why would it be shot at during the third? It would be visible on the radar the entire time, well in advance, since before landing it flies much higher than the drones, and does not try to evade radar detection. Additionally, since it was approaching to land, it was most definitely in constant communication with Grozny ATC and they knew about it. This could also be similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 someone posted below, except the engine would be under the wing rather than in the tail. Another possibility is a drone was shot down in close proximity and they were hit with residual shrapnel from that. That does seem unlikely, but not more so than a passenger plane withstanding three consecutive AD hits and then flying for over an hour.
By people comments it seems that rockets loaded with fragmentation warheads leave the same traces that can be seen in the photos of the tail of the plane, high velocity impacts, a damage very similar to what happened with MH17 flight as someone commented below.
The problem with the approaches probably was due the GPS was suffering spoofing[1], so the same way the avionics was receiving wrong data, can be guessed everyone was receiving wrong data, their "mistake" attack could have come from there, in addition, they did not close the air space to the civil planes, for unknown reasons. They will never admit exactly how they screwed it up, using what happened with MH17 as reference.
But an important matter here also is, even by diverting the plane with a declared emergency to cross the Caspian Sea, the pilots managed to arrive to the coast[3], and the GPS jamming across TWO-THIRDS of the Caspian Sea[2][1] what would have prevented finding survivors and fuselage evidences, had no effect. Now it can be investigated.
[3] Fighting to control and keep the plane flying, as the 3D image in the flightradar24 article[1] shows, rendered from the ADS-B data at moment the GPS jamming stopped. One can see at first glance how hard it was for them to cross the sea. The investigations and the black box will tell better what happened before.
