Written by Nelya Bagirova
BAKU (Reuters) – Azerbaijan on Sunday paid tribute to the pilots and passengers of the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, after Russian air defenses were used against Ukrainian drones.
Flight J2-8243 crashed Wednesday in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from southern Russia where Ukrainian drones were attacking several cities.
Captain Igor Kshenyakin and co-pilot Alexander Kalyaninov, both of Russian origin and Azerbaijani citizenship, and Hakma Aliyeva, a flight attendant, were honored at a ceremony in the Alley of Honor in central Baku attended by President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mehrban. .
Pilots in Azerbaijan were praised for landing in a way that allowed 29 people to survive but led to their deaths.
The Azerbaijani presidential office said that after the as-yet-unexplained incident over Russian airspace, the pilots struggled to control the plane – desperate to find a place to land.
With holes in the fuselage, some crew members injured, passengers praying for their lives in a depressurized cabin, and the plane spinning out of control, the pilots flew across the Caspian Sea toward their deaths in an emergency landing.
“Only thanks to the courage and professionalism of the pilots, the emergency landing was successfully carried out,” the Azerbaijani presidential office said.
The Alley of Honor is the holiest modern cemetery in Azerbaijan – where prominent politicians, poets and scholars are buried, including Heydar Aliyev, the late father of the current president.
Anastasia Kshenyakina, Captain Kshenyakina's daughter, said her father was a dedicated pilot who took his responsibilities to his passengers seriously.
“My father always said: When I take off, I am responsible not only for my life, but also for the lives of all the passengers and crew members,” Kishnakina said.
“On his final journey, he proved what a true hero should be.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized on Saturday to the Azerbaijani president for the “tragic accident” in Russian airspace involving the plane that Baku said crashed after some foreign intervention.
Four sources familiar with the preliminary results of Azerbaijan's investigation into the disaster told Reuters on Thursday that Russian air defenses shot down the plane by mistake.
The extremely rare public apology from Putin was the closest Moscow came to accepting some blame for Wednesday's disaster, although the Kremlin statement did not say Russia shot down the plane, but only indicated a criminal case had been opened.
The Embraer passenger plane had taken off from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to Grozny, in the Chechnya region in southern Russia, before deviating hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea.
