Ukrainian missile was culprit in Black Sea shoot-down
By Janes.com Editor Peter Felstead
A rogue Ukrainian surface-to-air missile (SAM), launched from the Crimean peninsula during a live-fire exercise, was responsible for bringing down the Sibir Airlines Tu-154 that crashed into the Black Sea on 4 October, Russian officials have all but confirmed.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s deputy parliamentary speaker, Viktor Medvedchuk, said on 11 October that the top military leaders responsible for the tragedy should resign, according to Russian news agency Interfax. Medvedchuk's statement is a signal that Kiev is preparing to admit responsibility for the incident. Sibir Airlines Flight 1812, which was en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk, crashed about 250km north of the Turkish Black Sea coast with the loss of all 78 passengers and crew.
The Ukrainian Defence Ministry vehemently denied responsibility in the immediate aftermath of the incident – and was still in denial as late as 9 October. However, wreckage fragments very similar to parts of an S-200 Angara (SA-5 ‘Gammon’) SAM – the type being fired during a Ukrainian exercise at the time – have been found by the Russian team investigating the crash.
More crucially, former Russian air Force commander Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, a member of the investigation team, said on 9 October that small metal balls found in the bodies of victims and in airframe sections recovered from the crash site resemble the S-200’s payload. The S-200, a Soviet low- to high-altitude SAM system first deployed operationally in 1966, has a high-explosive fragmentation warhead.
US DoD statements have said that intercepted telemetry data showed a single missile had gone ‘wildly off course’ before the Tu-154 exploded. Further to this, records obtained from a radar station in Gelendzhik on Russia’s Black Sea coast show that the region’s airspace was penetrated by a flying object that was not broadcasting its course or altitude, the New York Times reported on 10 October. This, according to a member of the Russian investigating team, was of “particular interest” to the inquiry.
Ukrainian officials, including President Leonid Kuchma, claimed throughout the week after the incident that the stray missile theory was impossible given the airliner’s distance from the live fire exercise, variously reported as 250-270km with the Tu-154 flying at an altitude of 36,000ft (just under 11,000m). However, the most recent variant of the Angara, the S-200D, can hit targets out to 300km at an altitude of 40,000m. Since 270km is the limit of the system’s ‘Square Pair’ H-band missile guidance radar, it seems likely that the missile – having failed to acquire the target drone it was intended to destroy – flew on to acquire a new target and may not have responded to any command signals made from the ground. With its active seeker head detecting the Sibir Airlines Tu-154 as a large target flying high in the sky at a constant speed, the missile would have homed in on the airliner until its proximity fuzing system detonated the warhead.
By Janes.com Editor Peter Felstead
A rogue Ukrainian surface-to-air missile (SAM), launched from the Crimean peninsula during a live-fire exercise, was responsible for bringing down the Sibir Airlines Tu-154 that crashed into the Black Sea on 4 October, Russian officials have all but confirmed.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s deputy parliamentary speaker, Viktor Medvedchuk, said on 11 October that the top military leaders responsible for the tragedy should resign, according to Russian news agency Interfax. Medvedchuk's statement is a signal that Kiev is preparing to admit responsibility for the incident. Sibir Airlines Flight 1812, which was en route from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk, crashed about 250km north of the Turkish Black Sea coast with the loss of all 78 passengers and crew.
The Ukrainian Defence Ministry vehemently denied responsibility in the immediate aftermath of the incident – and was still in denial as late as 9 October. However, wreckage fragments very similar to parts of an S-200 Angara (SA-5 ‘Gammon’) SAM – the type being fired during a Ukrainian exercise at the time – have been found by the Russian team investigating the crash.
More crucially, former Russian air Force commander Yevgenii Shaposhnikov, a member of the investigation team, said on 9 October that small metal balls found in the bodies of victims and in airframe sections recovered from the crash site resemble the S-200’s payload. The S-200, a Soviet low- to high-altitude SAM system first deployed operationally in 1966, has a high-explosive fragmentation warhead.
US DoD statements have said that intercepted telemetry data showed a single missile had gone ‘wildly off course’ before the Tu-154 exploded. Further to this, records obtained from a radar station in Gelendzhik on Russia’s Black Sea coast show that the region’s airspace was penetrated by a flying object that was not broadcasting its course or altitude, the New York Times reported on 10 October. This, according to a member of the Russian investigating team, was of “particular interest” to the inquiry.
Ukrainian officials, including President Leonid Kuchma, claimed throughout the week after the incident that the stray missile theory was impossible given the airliner’s distance from the live fire exercise, variously reported as 250-270km with the Tu-154 flying at an altitude of 36,000ft (just under 11,000m). However, the most recent variant of the Angara, the S-200D, can hit targets out to 300km at an altitude of 40,000m. Since 270km is the limit of the system’s ‘Square Pair’ H-band missile guidance radar, it seems likely that the missile – having failed to acquire the target drone it was intended to destroy – flew on to acquire a new target and may not have responded to any command signals made from the ground. With its active seeker head detecting the Sibir Airlines Tu-154 as a large target flying high in the sky at a constant speed, the missile would have homed in on the airliner until its proximity fuzing system detonated the warhead.
