Another Crash In The Former Soviet Union Sounds Alarm

With five plane crashes in 12 days, the safety record of aircraft from the former Soviet Union is going from bad to catastrophic.

In the latest calamity, a Ukrainian passenger jet with at least 70 people aboard disappeared Wednesday and apparently went down in rugged, snow-covered terrain near Mount Olympus in northern Greece.

Experts say the accidents are not merely a run of bad luck.

They point to poor maintenance, a desperate lack of money and lax controls among the hundreds of “babyflot” airlines that emerged when the Soviet Union’s monopoly carrier Aeroflot broke up six years ago.

While Greek rescue workers searched Thursday for the Ukraine Airlines Yak-42 that vanished, investigators from Russia to South Africa to the United Arab Emirates tried to find the causes of four crashes earlier this month that claimed more than 160 lives.

Boris Nemtsov, Russia’s first deputy premier, acknowledged that the government made a “grave mistake” by failing to properly oversee all of Russia’s small private airlines.

“This is madness,” Nemtsov said. “All the planes owned by small companies may crash sooner or later, as the (airlines) have no means to maintain them.”

Aging aircraft, frequent overloading and loose standards have made the problems worse.

All this was discussed back in 1994, when there was a rash of disasters involving Soviet planes. Aeroflot, still the region’s largest carrier, has revamped many planes and improved its record. But overall, little has been done to upgrade air safety in the 15 ex-Soviet republics.

Earlier this year, Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation, advised passengers to “avoid Russianmade planes” at all costs.

In her book, “Flying Blind, Flying Safe,” Schiavo dismissed them as “notorious for poor maintenance and parts” and often lacking obvious safety features.

Aviation officials in the region describe that as an unfair, blanket accusation, but most acknowledge that serious shortcomings exist.

“It’s hard to speak about safety when we lack money for everything,” Igor Kulikovsky, the head of Ukraine’s state-run airline Air Kiev, said Thursday. “Seventy percent of our fleet sits idle because we lack funds for repairs.”

The latest string of crashes began Dec. 6 when a giant military cargo plane slammed into an apartment building in Siberia right after takeoff, killing at least 68 people as it ignited a fireball. Substandard fuel may have caused its engines to stall, investigators have said.

Five days later, a military transport aircraft clipped a civilian helicopter with its wing in northern Russia, killing all eight passengers on the helicopter. Investigators said the plane’s crew had decided to land without asking ground controllers’ permission.