Narrative:Immediately after take-off the aircraft banked right at an altitude of about 50 m, crashed inverted and caught fire. Some high-ranking navy officials were aboard, returning to Vladivostok after an exercise in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
|Date:||Saturday 7 February 1981|
|C/n / msn:|| 76600402|
|First flight:|| 1957|
|Engines:|| 2 Mikulin AM-3M|
|Crew:||Fatalities: 6 / Occupants: 6|
|Passengers:||Fatalities: 45 / Occupants: 45|
|Total:||Fatalities: 51 / Occupants: 51 |
|Airplane damage:|| Damaged beyond repair|
|Location:||ca 20 km S of Leningrad ( Russia)
|Phase:|| En route (ENR)|
|Departure airport:||Pushkin Airport (ULLP), Russia|
|Destination airport:||Khabarovsk-Novy Airport (KHV/UHHH), Russia|
The accident was caused by the wrong seating of the passengers and improperly secured cargo which began to shift after takeoff. This caused the center of gravity to move beyond the certfied limits.
Loss of control
» Soviet Transports
» Dmitriy Yertsov
» Tupolev: The Man and His Aircraft / Andrei Kandalov, Paul Duffy , 1996 (ISBN 1560918993)
Follow-up / safety actions
The remaining military Tu-104 aircraft were grounded following this accident.
This information is not presented as the Flight Safety Foundation or the Aviation Safety Networkĺs opinion as to the cause of the accident. It is preliminary and is based on the facts as they are known at this time.