Aeroflot Flight 498 Explained

Aeroflot Flight 498 should not be confused with Aeroméxico Flight 498.

Aeroflot Flight 498 was a Soviet domestic passenger flight from Severomuysk to Ulan-Ude that crashed near Lake Baikal on 14 June 1981 en route to its planned stop at Nizhneangarsk Airport, Nizhneangarsk. All 44 passengers—including 13 children—and 4 crew members on board were killed, and the aircraft was destroyed. It remains the deadliest crash involving an Ilyushin Il-14.

Aircraft

CCCP-41838 was an Ilyushin Il-14M manufactured on 1 January 1957, with 16,185 total air hours and 18,427 cycles. The aircraft was equipped with engines registered as B B 29471633 252073177. At the time of the crash it was being operated by the East Siberia Civil Aviation Directorate of Ulan-Ude under Aeroflot.

Flight description

The crew consisted of Captain Alex T Mordovia, co-pilot Alexander Lobsonovich Kyrmygenov, and Flight Engineer Alexander Zharnikov. Aeroflot Flight 498 was originally scheduled to fly from Severomuysk to Baikal International Airport in Ulan-Ude, with a planned stopover at Nizhneangarsk Airport in Nizhneangarsk. The flight had exceeded its takeoff weight capacity by . The aircraft left from Severomuysk at 09:41 MSK.

Due to bad weather, Nizhneangarsk Airport closed, and the crew rerouted the aircraft to land at an airfield in nearby Ust-Barguzin. Mountains surrounding Lake Baikal were at that time obscured by the cloud cover, and visibility was only about with rain and winds of up to 5m/s. Foggy conditions and low visibility were likewise reported on Holy Nose Peninsula, what would later become the aircraft's crash site. At 10:30 MSK, almost an hour after takeoff, the crew reported a nearby flight, and at 10:41 began communications with the air tower at Ulan-Barguzin in preparation for landing. Conditions around the Ust-Barguzin airfield were slightly more favorable than had been projected at the aircraft's height. At 11:02 the aircraft called in to report their location, but in violation of air rules, the crew instead called the air control tower at Ulan-Ude and did not report back to Ust-Barguzin. Additionally, they did not report their location or weather conditions. The aircraft's data finder, ARP-6, was found to be unstable, about which the Ust-Barguzin air tower warned Flight 498 well in advance. Due to the faulty equipment, the flight deviated to the right from its course about . At 11:16, the aircraft descended from a height of to . Shortly before the crash, the flight crew intentionally misinformed the flight deck that the airfield was in sight, and the air tower gave them visual instructions on landing; the crew accepted these instructions at 11:21, without actually being in sight of the air field. The pilot then mistook the Holy Nose Peninsula for the location of the air field.

At 11:22 MSK, the aircraft crashed above sea level on the side of a mountain located on the Holy Nose Peninsula in Lake Baikal, about from the Ust-Barguzin airfield. The flight crashed at a 10-degree angle to the left and an angle of trajectory of 2 or 3 degrees. All 48 people—44 passengers (including 13 children) and 4 crew members—were killed during the crash, and the aircraft was a total loss. Much of the equipment was destroyed in the crash, making the exact cause of the accident difficult to pinpoint. Among this equipment was the radio compass ARC-5, making its efficiency impossible to determine. Ultimately, the crash was attributed to passive piloting and pilot error.