Originally Posted by
atakacs
Understood.
Presumably the aircraft initially departed with full tanks?
Planned route was Chkalovsky - Mozdok - Syria. En-route they was diverted to Sochi. So presumably crew recalculated fuel and ordered refueling. Also there was some indication that crew was aware - in the leaked audio recording from radioscanner at the plane-tower communication Cptn added "heavy" to callsign. They also decided to takeoff from the treshold which is quite unusual for this rwy.