An Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 carrying 62 passengers and five crew crashed while attempting to land at Aktau Airport Kazakhstan on the morning of Dec. 25.
Flight J2 8243 took off from Baku and was originally bound for the Russian city of Grozny, but diverted to Aktau in Kazakhstan. The airline said the crew attempted an emergency landing approximately 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan.
Flightradar24 data shows that the vertical speed of the aircraft changed more than 100 times during the last 74 minutes of the flight reaching extreme values from minus 8,300 ft./min. to very steep climbs of up to 8,300 ft./min, indicating a possible flight control issue. Videos of the crashed aircraft show many large holes on the tail plane that suggest they may have come under air defense fire.
Azerbaijan Airlines said it is suspending flights from Grozny to Baku and Makhachkala/Russia until the accident investigation is concluded. All other flights will continue to be operated as planned.
The Kazakh government said 38 of the 67 people onboard have died. It would make the crash one of the worst involving an E190, according to data from the Flight Safety Foundation's Aviation Safety Network. In 2010, 44 people died in a Henan Airlines crash involving the aircraft type, according to ASN data.
The airline said that according to preliminary data 37 passengers were from Azerbaijan, 16 from Russia, 6 from Kazakhstan and 3 from Kyrgyzstan.
Flight tracking site Flightradar24 shows the aircraft taking off from Baku at 03:55 UTC time, with contact to ADS-B data initially lost at 04:40 UTC due to GPS jamming. The track was regained at 06:07 UTC before lost again at the time of the crash at 06:28 UTC.
Videos circulating on the internet show the aircraft climbing and descending in short sequence, then making a steep right turn and descending rapidly, before hitting the ground and going up in flames.
Aviation Week Network's Fleet Discovery database shows the aircraft, registered as 4K-AZ65, was 11.5 years old and delivered to the carrier in July 2013. It had clocked 9,474 hours in 6,296 flights.
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