I spotted our plane behaving weird first on BBC.
Live by Pulkovo, was a passenger on TU-s many times, never saw them, ordinary boring things, so I would say "posessed" ! :o))
They better tell all what happened, because a passenger starts looking at them with suspicion, total circus.
Did they install on it a computer? 10 years ago? It seems to do the opposite of what a pilot would want it to do, like, a totally self-will behaving plane. And it seems it took the crew a while to get the angle of how to fight this, eh, sudden phenomena. Our planes are usually sturdy and simple and hand-driven, how can it not respond at all! to what the crew "tells it" to do? It must be all broken inside entirely. But then, if its readings read wrong parameters, it wouldn't take off - in the first place, they'd cut it. So it happened after the take-off.
?
The only thing I heard as a rumour when TU-154 become uncontrollable is when it is tossed in a thunderstorm cloud by an air current higher than it's 11 thousand km, a sudden toss to over 12 thousand km. Either the air becomes too thin for it there or something - and it's a defect in the design - they don't stand sudden tossing upwards over their "ceiling".
But that some pilots manage as know what to do then, but most (ours)are not trained for that occurance.
With wheels - it is because Soviet aerodrome "state standards" :o) allowed for up to 10 centimetre holes between the beton slabs on the run-way :o) there are a lot of small northern aerodromes and old aerodromes, and the requirement to TU designers was that a plane should not mind holes in the runway :o))))))