MOSCOW - Russian state television has aired the final words, of the pilots of the flydubai passenger jet that crashed in Rostov-on-Don last week killing 62 people, suggesting pilot error could be to blame.
Russia's Rossiya-1 channel said late on Friday it had obtained a transcript of the last words exchanged a minute before the Boeing 737 plunged to the ground from a source in the investigative commission with access to the plane's voice recorders.
The plane, which was arriving from Dubai, exploded into a fireball last Saturday after missing the runway in the city in southern Russia while making a second attempt to land in heavy wind and rain.
It was carrying 55 passengers and seven crew members. There were no survivors.
PICTURE: Russian Emergency Ministry rescuers search the wreckage of a crashed airplane at the Rostov-on-Don airport on March 20, 2016. CREDIT: AFP
The transcript suggests that the pilot lost control of the plane immediately after switching off the autopilot.
"Don't worry," the pilot says repeatedly in the transcript translated into Russian, before repeating seconds later "Don't do that!" The last words are repeated calls to "Pull up!"
For the last six seconds of the plane's dive, all that can be heard are "inhuman screams," the channel's source said.
The channel suggested -- citing specialists while stressing that this was not the official version -- that the pilot accidentally switched on a stabilising fin at the tail as he tried to pull the plane back to a horizontal position.
With this fin activated, "the plane practically does not react to the pilot's control panel" the channel said.
"The pilots clearly did not understand that the stabiliser was to blame for the steep dive."
The channel said the pilot could have accidentally switched on the button activating the fin due to his reported "chronic fatigue."
The only other possible explanation would be an "unprecedented glitch in the plane's automatic systems," the channel said.
Aircraft control out of sync
Sputnik media, meanwhile, reported on Monday that the Boeing 737-800 could have crashed due to a conflict in the cockpit.
PICTURE: File image of the interior of a Boeing 737-800. CREDIT: Flickr.com/Frans Zwart
According to a source of Russia’s Kommersant newspaper, decoding of the parametric data and voice recorders of the plane revealed that pilots had twice attempted to land the aircraft in automatic mode, but failed to do so due to difficult weather conditions. The pilots eventually decided to come in to land in manual mode.
Experts claim that the crew failed to take characteristics of Boeing 737-800 into consideration, particularly transition from landing to ascend. The pilot on the controls continued to ascend and attempted to pick up speed, while his co-pilot tried to stop gaining altitude. As a result, control of the aircraft was out of sync.
CREDIT: Faisal Akram from Dhaka, Bangladesh, via Wikimedia Commons
The investigation has not yet managed to establish which pilot made a fatal error.
Investigators have launched a criminal probe into whether poor weather, pilot error or a technical fault were behind the crash.