Rosaviacia state that it will check if all pilot licenses issued in the retraining program 2009 was legitimate (the both pilots were retrained 2010). They don't speak about fake licences.
They also start inspections at all Tatarstan carriers (AK Bars, Tulpar, KAPO) and start to investigate a person(s), responsible for state supervision.
??????????


Rosaviacia document, linked by Sergey, order some technical check of elevator system for all 737 .
1. To check Elevator Power Control Unit and Input Crank for pollution and/or foreign objects.
2. To check fluent movement of elevator (powered on) in accordance with recommendation AMM-27-31-00 (Insufficient elevator travel, Excessive force to move column with power on).

Not just here
 

From the link "tdracer" posted:

"To help ease the crew shortage, aviation officials set up centers to train navigators and flight engineers to serve as pilots of Western-made planes. Critics said that carriers often sought to cut corners on training in the run for profits."

This kind of thing is happening in every industry worldwide. Somewhere, we've all lost touch with the fact that safety and understanding of what's going on are the most important parts, with profits being secondary.

Making more profit does you no good if you're not around to spend it :=

2 SawMan: /+100!!!

About fake license - few Training Centers continued pilots training after Training Center License had been expired - it's a reason of "fake" licenses.

I suppose that pilot's licence is issued by Rosaviacia, based on various documents, incl. ones from the Training Centre. Rosaviacia is also responsible for licensing for all training centres. In this situation it is very strange to speak about "fake" license.

Retraining of the both was provided by Sibir Training Centre. S7 belongs to the four biggest carriers in Russia. I can hardly believe that they give "fake" documents.

Prime minister Medvedev, answering a question, told that the investigation has to continue, because this case is very "странный" - strange, unusual.

The problem in Russia I think is not fake licenses.
But the fact that you can manage to get your license without meeting the requirements..
I have heard stories of Crews performing type ratings, where one Examinor fails them and suggest extensive re-training. Then by some "magic" the next day with a more "friendly" instructor they pass with no remarks.
Strange indeed.

"fake" a coded nickname for "friendly" : No !
 

That supposed "friendly" behaviour is built on a mountain of systematic blackmails (sex, gifts, medals, advantages, etc.) organised to increase power of very few powerful people who know they are killers puting aircrafts, crews and passengers in death threat, but will not decrease too much "statistics" so that national safety Boards, Courts, Unions, Victims' families and Insurers get not able to see the lies' system after the crash happens.
I could watch that in my Country too.
It is time to stop that.

It is very hopeful that investigators speak loudly about all problems and that government don't try to cover it. Everyone can see, it is firstly a big shame for Rosaviacia ( i.e. Federal Agency of Air Traffic /FAVT/, part of Ministry of Transport). They are issuing licences both for pilots and training centres and they are responsible for supervision over training centres. The head of Tatarstan FAVT leave his post already and others will follow him.
Tatarstan Air was supported by highest local politics and richest persons and despite their power, it is very probable that it loose its AOC. Similar as Red Wings lost their AOC after VKO incident despite of huge power of their owner, oligarch Lebedev.

I think that MAK and FAVT really tries to make things better, it is also one of Putin's priorities. MAK is very experienced investigator and then FAVT does very strict measures.

I think what the meaning may be here is that the licences were technically invalid in some minor sense but the contributory factor is likely to be negligible.

As I stated earlier in the thread the entire crew (both flight deck and cabin) of the Perm 737 crash held technically invalid licences in some way, although none of this was contributory to the crash.

WSJ article: "Russia Investigates Fake Pilot Licenses at Small Carriers"
 

Per the WSJ:

"Pilots working for small regional airlines in Russia may be flying with licenses fraudulently obtained from flight schools they never attended, the country's top investigative agency said Friday."

Russia Investigates Fake Pilot Licenses - WSJ.com

It may seem only semantics but there's surely a considerable difference between a fake licence and a licence that is obtained fraudulently.

A fake - ie counterfeit - licence should be easily detected by cross referencing it with the central CAA database which will show it simply does not exist.

A licence that has been issued either in good faith or with connivance (by the CAA) on the basis of fraudulent submissions by the training organisation is a much more pernicious thing and much harder to detect and it seems this may be the situation with the Russian FEs and Navs.

At least Western pilots with Parker Pen hours tend to have passed the necessary exams and checks so even if they don't have the required experience they have at east demonstrated a required standard. If it is the training and standards of checks that are circumvented and result in the issue of a genuine licence you have a much, much more serious situation.

I hope (without much hope) that this is not widespread.

Sadly the abysmal accident record of Russian airlines shows they have a long way to go........

This Russian TV program on you-tube apparently is very good, discusses this catastrophe and overall state of the Russian civilian aviation. Could someone with knowledge of Russian language tell us some major points from this discussion.

(I ran into some problems linking this film, could not solve the problem with double-posting, sorry)

Wow, that was a long video. A few points I've written down during watching:

- There are multiple system problems with aviation in Russia.
- People in Kazan treat this tragedy as their personal.
- There is not enough information to jump to any conclusions yet.
- Veteran pilot (Oleg Smirnov): GA was very unprofessional, many things went wrong, including the lack of any yoke inputs during climb and possibly other things, such as the order and timing of flaps and gear retraction and so on.
- ICAO expert (Vitaly Bordunov): Many documents released by ICAO are totally ignored in Russia because the committee for interaction with ICAO was dismissed during the USSR collapse.
- ICAO expert: Too many never ending reforms are being performed on the Russian aviation.
- Economic information agency expert (Ekaterina Sobol): Who is responsible for making inexperienced ex-navigator a captain?
- Economic information agency expert: We should let airlines hire foreign captains so our first officers can learn from them.
- Head of the pilot union (Miroslav Boychuk): We shouldn't accept foreign captains because only the worst of them will actually agree to work in Russia.
- Head of the pilot union: The problem is that airlines are often controlled by pure economists that only care for money, airline safety experts get fired if they oppose top managers.
- Head of the pilot union: There is no actual lack of pilots in Russia. There are more pilots being trained than required by Russian airlines.
- Head of the pilot union: Rosaviatsiya acts based on data provided by airlines themselves so thay can lack the data to actually control them.
- Economic information agency expert: Nope, they knew everything. Everybody knew that Tatarstan has a lot of problems. That knowledge didn't help.
- Economic information agency expert: There is no problem in hiring foreign pilots. Emirates does it, pilots from around the globe work there, and they are good pilots.
- Head of the pilot union: It's fine to have old planes flying in our airlines, but when those planes are leased, not owned, there is a problem with getting the maintenance done right. The process of ordering spare parts for foreign-made planes is very tedious in Russia.
- ICAO expert: Both the lessee and the lessor try to gain as much as possible from a leasing contract. The lessor tries to give out planes that aren't as good as they try to make them look while the lessee doesn't care much about proper maintenance of the plane that is to be given back to the lessor anyway.
- ICAO expert: A strong state control over aviation is needed.
- Economic information agency expert: If we try to force our airlines to buy planes instead of leasing them, we'll either have to fly on Russian made planes or we'll have to fly foreign airlines even on internal flights, loosing the market entirely.
- ICAO expert: It is hard for Russian airlines to either buy or lease planes because Russian laws doesn't match the appropriate international convention.
- ICAO expert: Russian state programs on developing and manufacturing our own planes are purely declarative. There are transportation strategies up to 2030, but air transport is hardly mentioned there.
- the president of the non-commercial Flights Safety partnership (Rafail Aptukov): Yes, the strategy only mentions repairs of 19 runways and building 9 new ones. That's it.
- head of the pilot union: Only 3% of the commercial flights are on Russian made planes, 97% are on foreign built ones.
- the Flights Safety partnership president: Russian standards don't match international ones, various metric and language issues for example, lead to foreign pilot licenses being de-facto invalid in Russia. That means foreign pilots would require re-training in Russia.

TL;DR: Russian aviation has a lot of problems with laws, standards and their actual implementation. Nobody cares to fix these problems.

Good job Sergey! :ok:

2 Sunamer:

It is not an update.....

There is no new info at the moment.

The central "metaproblem" is the persistent assumption of uniqueness, one might even call it a quest for the uniquely Russian way of doing things.

It is implemented by approaching every problem as if Russia is the only country in the world, and trying to come with the solution on their own, without paying much attention to established practices everywhere. In essence, it's reinventing the wheel at every step and 9 out of 10 times the wheel ends up being oval (if not square).

They have a unique set of flight regulations that does not match anyone else's so the pilots have to learn them before they can be hired by domestic airlines. They _still_ don't require all ATC's to speak English, even after that was mandated by ICAO 10 years ago. (New ATC's are taught English during training, but requirements are waived for preexisting workers in smaller airports.) They have a ban on foreign pilots that they are considering lifting, but it's still unclear how many foreign pilots would actually want to learn Russian regs and Russian language as a condition of working there.

In this crash, before the dust even settled in Kazan and before a single bit of data was extracted from flight recorders, there was already a legislative attempt in their Parliament (Duma) to ban domestic airlines from using 20+ year old aircraft. And now we even hear talks about requiring airlines to own their own aircraft. All this happens while there's still no evidence that there was anything wrong with the plane, without paying the slightest attention to the experience of Western countries. (Of course, experts generally know better, and MAK even released a statement in opposition, but it's not certain if anyone in the government is going to pay attention to experts either.)

Part of the problem is the general disrespect towards foreign experiences in particular and foreign countries in general, especially the "capitalist countries" and especially the Great Satan himself, the USA. If you want to turn Russians strongly against something, all you need is to tell them "this is the way they do it in the United States".

2 hamster3null:
Isn't it a little rusophobic? Sorry, but it looks like you are not much informed about their mentality and a local conditions in Russia. BTW, I think, that average American believes in Russian Evil Empire more often then average Russian believes in US Great Satan.

Given the amount of billboards, TGI Fridays, Burger Kings, McDonalds etc I see in Russia, I don´t think your statement has something to do with reality.

I think aviation in Russia already made big progresses, but they have to come a long way before they are were the US are. But if you look at the vast size and lack of funds anywhere but Moscow and Petersburg and the corruption everywhere, then its clear it will take time. Oligarchs owning airlines doesn´t help either, these guys are not used to stick to rules.

In the TV discussion, the most emotive, discussed and controversial issue was foreign pilots in Russian cockpits. Except lady economist, the others was non-committal and support it only temporarily.

If I can remember, nobody supported an idea of a ban for a/c, older then 20 years. Rosaviacia and MAK clearly call it a nonsense. IMHO, this idea has historic roots. Five or ten years ago, when a plane in Russia crashed, mostly all west papers denoted that it was caused using old Soviet unreliable planes... Now they mostly use western planes, but the situation repeats. Some uninformed persons search the same solutions, i.e. not using old unreliable planes or change B by A (last disaster was with B). But it surely is not an official stance, only media gave to it wide publicity.

I'm informed well enough - I grew up there.

Just compare opinion polls in Russia and the US. If you ask a question along the lines of "who is your country's greatest enemy", most Americans will say Iran/China/North Korea, with Russia barely in the picture. Russians will put the US as #1 without anyone else coming even close.

It's definitely a somewhat schizophrenic attitude, since American _products_, from Hollywood to McDonalds, are quite popular.

P.S. The idea of a quest for the unique Russian way of doing things is well documented, there is even a special word for it, "samobytnost". And the perceived value of learning from the West took a big hit in the early 90's, when early Russian reformers tried doing just that, and everyone knows how that worked out.

I don't want to stray too far off-topic. The point is that, as Sergey said, "Too many never ending reforms are being performed on the Russian aviation", and these reforms are not based on attempts to adopt things that work abroad, but on samobytnye attempts to fix perceived problems incrementally, often by people who have no idea what these problems are, how to fix them and what side effects their proposals might have.

Rosaviacia and MAK are not the ones making the decision. Here's the latest draft of the legislation. It is co-signed by 16 members of Duma:

http://asozd2.duma.gov.ru/main.nsf/%...RN=399164-6&02

The limit is now 15 years and it applies to foreign aircraft only (if you have a Tu-154, feel free to use it till it falls apart.)

How many members has The Gosduma? Nearly 500? You can find a similar naive initiatives in any parliament on the world.

I agree, it is mostly an emotion sphere and there are lot of other places to discuss it.

I'll have to partly disagree with that. The problem is not that Russia tries to be unique. The problem is that it IS unique, but instead of taking some western practice and adapting it to Russian reality, the decision-making idiots often just come up with random 'solutions' that don't have anything to do with neither western practices nor with common sense.

The idea to ban 20+ years old planes is a good example. It is stupid, it won't work, and it isn't the way it works in the West. But! If you just take some western practice verbatim, it usually doesn't work in Russia as well.

For example, these days smoking is prohibited in many countries in many places. Which is not just a good thing, but an absolutely wonderful thing IMO, just about the same level as that you can't just hit people on their heads with something heavy. Now how it works in Russia? They recently adopted a low to prohibit smoking in many public places. Very similar law to those in western countries. OK, so does it work? NO. Why? Because it's common sense in Russia to just ignore any (and I mean any!) law. In fact, the ONLY thing that law actually did was that they dismantled smoking rooms in airports so people started to smoke in airport toilets instead.

ICAO expert was speaking about standards and documents, which is pretty much expected from an ICAO expert. This is all fine, but even if we formally adopt all those standards and documents I'm afraid nobody will care to actually obey them. There are just too many things terribly broken here, like laws, courts, prosecutor offices, police etc. Now if people die in an aviation accident, some people may loose their jobs because of it. If they go to jail instead, and not only if people actually die, but even if they just intentionally break the aviation safety laws, then it might actually work. But Duma is preoccupied with stupid ideas like prohibiting 20+ year old planes or letting the foreign pilots work here instead.

If you want to produce a valid argument against this stupid 20 or 15 years old aircraftt ban , just use the ICAO statistics: today the region with the oldest fleet in the world is North America, and the region with the youngest fleet is South America, compare the incdents and accidents rates of the both regions.

Also if you take hull losses per million departures, The Russian the good old Tu154 had a much better ratio than the Boeing 737, not to mention MD11s or FK28s. Safety is a bit more complicated than the age of the aircraft.

Completely false.
The number of hull loses as a percentage of total aircraft produced is about 6.9% for Tu-154 and 6.7% for DC-10 and only about 2% for 737. So just by this statistics Tu-154 is much worse than 737 and even worse than DC-10. Of course the real utilization rate of Tu-154 (its life span was also much shorter) was much lower than in western fleet hence its true accident rate per departure would be even worse when compared to 737.

Porterhouse, I think you read my post too fast.
I am quoting hulls losses per million departures, which is the common standard used by people involved in safety. Never heard of percentage of hull losses per aircraft manufactured.
These are the figures commonly used :
Hull loss with fatalities (*) per million departures .
For same generation aircraft :
B727 : 0,72
DC9 0,78
T154M :0,80
B737/200 : 0,89
DC10 : 1,31
MD11:2.10
FK28 :2.35
if you want to go to the previous generation :
DC8 : 4.0
B707/720 :4,27

(*) without fatalities the rate varies but proportionally. Of course older types ( like for instance B747-100 and 200 ) get today bad stats as they do not get repaired because of they low residual value. The same apply I guess for Tu154s today. Therefore the total hull loss is not really useful for safety , especially for older types.

True but sometimes you don't have anything else. The best aircraft accident statistics specifically exclude aircraft made in CIS/USSR because of lack of operational data. So you can take hull losses which are available and adjust for utilization which was always particularly low in CIS/USSR.

I claim that whatever departures you are using for Tu-154 is a totally unreliable number.

Porterhouse : Possibly, but they are coming from MAK. Tupolev, contrary to Boeing or Airbus do nor provide verifyable figures, you are right, especially today. . But in the days of Soviet Aeroflot, calculations were easy to verify and in those days the Tu 154M had a quite good safety record.

GobonaStick :Well, we obviously have a different definition of what is a professional .No need to denigrate people, especially when you do not know .

I would argue just the opposite - nobody could easily verify data from that period of history since record keeping was either very shoddy or skewed by political considerations therefore what today is regarded as the gold-standard accident statistics report simply ignores it.

Agree to work in Russia?
 

A- Head of the pilot union (Miroslav Boychuk): We shouldn't accept foreign captains because only the worst of them will actually agree to work in Russia.

B- Head of the pilot union: There is no actual lack of pilots in Russia. There are more pilots being trained than required by Russian airlines.

A is a very good point.

Then go to B,what makes the good ones agree to stay in Russia?

Perhaps, but is a bit humorous at the same time.
If they pay decent world-wages I bet quite a few 'good' pilots would agree to work for them. But without need to push any new laws about foreign pilots working in Russia I don't hear the obvious - send all these 'suspect' pilots from regional airlines to very reputable foreign training facilities, say FlightSafety Int., validate their competency and retrain to FlightSafety standards if necessary. How many of them would even pass a rigorous simulator check ride at FlightSafety?

aviation-safety.net reports 17 hull losses with fatalities for Tu-154M. Wikipedia reports that 320 of those have been built. The rate of 0.8 per million departures would then translate into an average of 66,000 departures (flight cycles) for each of the 320 aircraft, which seems about 5x high for a long-range aircraft that only entered mass production in 1984.

Tu-154M barely had a chance to fly in the days of Soviet Aeroflot. It was in production for 7 years by the time of the fall of the USSR. The first recorded hull loss of the 154M is dated 1990.

The regular 154 came out earlier (1973) and it had 17 fatal accidents between 1973 and 1991, probably with no more than 300 aircraft in operation at any point (too lazy to look for production stats now), which would also point to a pretty high fatal loss rate per departure.

P.S. Aviation-safety.net gives flight cycle numbers for some of the crashed 154M's and it looks like they pretty consistently average ~700 departures/year.
If we assume that the average Tu-154M is 23 years old (manufactured in 1990) and all remaining aircraft are still in regular service, we get 5 million departures and the hull loss rate of 3.4 per million.

Two problems. One is that only biggest carriers pay good wages, but then again they already have good enough pilots. No fatal accidents at all for Transaero with huge number of flights, for example. The small carriers such as Tatarstan probably won't be able to afford good foreign pilots.

Another problem is that with all that crazy stuff going around in Russia, it would be pretty hard for a foreigner to work for a Russian airline. So they will have to pay more than an average worldwide good salary to get them to work in these conditions. Pilots will have a hard time fighting Russian mentality and trying to 'blend in' so to speak.

Hamster3null " impressive calculations/deductions , thanks for taking the time. . I just took my figures from MAK ( and Boeing) papers presented a year or so back. But as we all know political considerations often enter statistics in Russia ! I will keep a copy of your post and use it to ask some questions next time I meet them!

These TU154 figures are complete nonsense, and some people really have to get their facts right.

"The regular 154 came out earlier (1973) and it had 17 fatal accidents** between 1973 and 1991, probably with no more than 300 aircraft in operation at any point,- which would also point to a pretty high fatal loss rate per departure."

TU154 and variants started flying roughly the same time as Concorde and was still in production in 2009.

first hull loss:-
1973 Prague.

**I can think of 2/3 that got shot down, another couple that the pilot turned the fuel pumps off, while taking off, another one that caught fire about a year ago because of a short circuit, and another one that flew straight into a thunderstorm, and yet another downed by a terrorist, never mind the 2 they set burnt to cinders, refuelling next to each other!

I'm told one of the fatalities was down to putting one of these birds down at 5g+ and some poor chap having a heart attack. (Dagestan avia 372)

About 95% of all the other incidents were down to pilot error on what has now become one of the most rugged & reliable classic workhorses still flying.

RA-85684 actually saved the entire passengers and crew thanks to being built like the proverbial brick house lavatory.

At this rate someone is gonna start the rumour mill about the Polish president thread all over again too.

Nothing has anything to do with the safety record or even the age of the aircraft, or are we going to start suggesting Lockerbie is an everyday event too?

Hull losses, with fatalities ?

So it the case with other aircraft types.
I suggest you grasp a simple fact - we are comparing Tu-154 numbers with those of other aircraft types not analyzing a cause of every single accident. Such comparison does make sense because it is done routinely in aircraft accident statistics. if you want you can sift through every single accident for Tu-154 and do the same for 737 and eliminate every single one where pilot error was involved but nobody does it - makes no sense because it is going o be a wash and you end up as if you were comparing raw numbers without all this work.

I stand corrected on one point: it flew in 1972, not 1973. I said "between 1973 and 1991" because the discussion above was in regard to Soviet era.

Most crashes are caused at least partially by the human factor. It's best to compare all crashes vs. all crashes. Or at least to exclude terrorist attacks only. If we get the hull loss rate of Soviet-era 154 that is several times higher than all-time hull loss rate of B737 (including all the losses in places like Indonesia, which seems to have become a veritable B737 graveyard recently), either the machine is poorly built, or its pilots and mechanics are poorly trained, or it's some combination of these, and it's really not my objective to assign blame here.

According to
Accident Database: By Manufacturer/Type > TU-154
There was only 11 air disasters with fatalities between years 1973 -1991. It may be not complete list.

First Prague disaster - not determined the cause, second Beirut - not determined too, it is still mysterious, maybe it was shot down. Nacias Nguema - not determined, Al Bayda - lack of fuel after divert....

According to
? russianplanes.net ? ???? ???????
there was 759 Tu-154 flying in 1991

This list does not have:
SU-AXB (1974, Egypt, training flight, 6 fatalities)
LZ-BTB (1978, Syria, 4 fatalities)
CCCP-85169 (1978, central Russia, 4 fatalities)
YR-TPH (1980, Mauritania, 1 fatality)
CCCP-85413 (1988, Russia, 8 fatalities) - OK, this one was a hijacking so let's drop this one
YR-TPJ (1989, Romania, 5 fatalities)

Good source for production numbers. By 1991 596 Tu-154's were completed, not counting M's and pre-production frames. (I seriously underestimated the degree to which aircraft production went off the cliff after 1991.) Assuming that all of those survived to 1991, I see about 7700 aircraft-years of operations (e.g. 11 aircraft made in 1971 * 20 years from 1971 to 1991 = 220 aircraft-years, etc.) At 700 departures/year, that's 5.4 million departures and 3 losses per million departures.

For M's, it says that more than 80% of Tu-154M were manufactured between 1986 and 1993, so my previous estimate stands. This family only accumulated about 500 aircraft-years by 1991, so the expected number of fatal accidents in this family by 1991 at 3 losses / million departures was only ~1.