Il-18 crash site in Alma-Ata

The site of the 1965 Il-18 crash in Alma-Ata: on a snowy field by the Alma-Ata airport (now Almaty, Kazakhstan), on the night of 3 to 4 January 1965, an Aeroflot Il-18B passenger airliner registered CCCP-75685 crashed on approach. Of the 103 people on board, 64 were killed.

The flight and the crew

The aircraft was built by Moscow Plant No. 30 in May 1959. That day it was flying the Moscow – Omsk – Semipalatinsk – Alma-Ata route. It left Domodedovo late and landed in Semipalatinsk in the afternoon, then had to wait: Alma-Ata was closed by weather, and the departure was held for almost two and a half hours, until 19:30 Moscow time.

The captain was Konstantin Artamonov, with first officer Nikolai Slamikhin, navigator Vladimir Pristavka, flight engineer Anatoly Shakirov and radio operator Nikolai Safonov. Rishat Azakov of the Kazakh civil aviation directorate was on board as check pilot: he was returning from a business trip and had put himself on the crew.

The 1965 Il-18 crash in Alma-Ata

The crew was told of solid overcast with a base of 40 metres, haze and visibility of 3 kilometres. Shortly before, another aircraft had landed at Alma-Ata only on its third attempt, on a different heading. The flight director first sent the Il-18 to its alternate, Karaganda, but then reversed the decision and cleared it to descend to Alma-Ata. The crew was not given the actual weather: the flight director had no reports from the airport weather station for 20:00, 20:15 and 20:30.

On final approach there was fog, with visibility down to 800 metres, below the minimum. The check pilot told the captain to fly the approach on instruments only. Near the inner marker the aircraft entered the fog and the pilots lost sight of the runway lights. It drifted right, touched the snowy field to the right of the runway, slid across the snow, overturned and struck the trees of a shelter belt. The fuselage and the left wing broke apart and a fire broke out.

Three of the 8 crew and 61 of the 95 passengers died, 64 people in all. Five crew members and 34 passengers, including a child, survived. The aircraft was struck off the register on 23 January 1965.

Causes

The commission blamed errors by the crew, who continued the approach in weather below minimums, and by air traffic control: the crew received neither the actual weather nor a fog warning, and the controller cleared the landing to continue.

Getting there

The marker is on the edge of Almaty, by Zakarpatskaya Street, next to the airport. The aircraft came down in a field to the right of the runway, a few hundred metres from it. Part of the land around the airfield is fenced off, so only the area outside the fence can be reached.