The city court of Khimki (Moscow region) sentenced Denis Evdokimov, the captain of an SSJ-100 plane that burned in Sheremetyevo, to six years in a colonial settlement. TASS reports this from the courtroom.
“The court decided to find Evdokimov guilty in accordance with Part 3 of Art. 263 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of traffic safety rules) and sentenced him to six years in prison in a colonial settlement, ”says the judge’s decision.
In addition, the court satisfied the claims of two victims, 1.5 million rubles each. Also, the court banned Evdokimov from flying the plane for three years.
TASS states that Captain Evdokimov was not detained in the courtroom and should have appeared alone in the colony settlement.
Yevdokimov’s spokesperson, Natalya Mitusova, said the pilot’s lawyers wanted to appeal the decision, saying it was “too harsh”. According to him, the client will receive an order to appear in the colony only after the court decision takes effect.
On May 24, the state prosecutor’s office asked Evdokimov for six years in prison in a colonial settlement. The prosecutor’s office said that the cause of the disaster was non-compliance with the ship’s operating rules. The plane was not stable enough to land and the pilot did not “detect an emergency” and set an emergency code. Superjet 100 landed with “excessive overload”.
“At the time of the third touch, the shelves were already partially destroyed. The representative of the state prosecutor’s office withstood the first blow to the rack, the second blow to the strip was very strong, and then the racks were broken, ”said the representative of the state prosecutor’s office.
The incident at Sheremetyevo Airport occurred on May 5, 2019. After a hard landing and a fire on the Sukhoi Superjet-100 (SSJ-100), 40 passengers and a flight attendant died.
The prosecution claims that the cause of the disaster was the negligence of the crew, their refusal to dump excess fuel before landing. Evdokimov’s defense indicates that lightning struck the plane at an altitude of 2.7 km, and some systems malfunctioned and some malfunctioned. According to the defense’s position, it was not safe to generate fuel in the air, so the PIC decided to land with too much landing weight.
According to Evdokimov’s plan, the landing gear had to be cut, but unfortunately they tore the wall of the fuel tank and a fire broke out due to a fuel leak.
In 2020, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation claimed that Evdokimov “roughly grounded the aircraft, violating the rules of use of the aircraft, causing the aircraft to be destroyed and fired”.
Moreover, the investigation – according to the testimony of Svetlana Petrenko, representative of the Investigative Committee – managed to refute Evdokimov’s words that the plane was malfunctioning. The black box data showed that the ship “reacted appropriately to the pilot’s actions”.
Denis Evdokimov drew attention in a conversation he had with himself. “Lentoy.ru” In 2020, it was claimed that the chassis design did not meet “airworthiness standards”.
“I sincerely regret and apologize for my participation in these events. More precisely, I realized that the lives of passengers and crew depended on the correctness of my actions, and I did everything possible, ”said the pilot.
According to Yevdokimov, test flights with a landing at a mass exceeding the maximum landing weight were not conducted. However, in the manufacturer’s documentation there was a note about the possibility of landing with a mass up to maximum takeoff.
“I won’t back down, and whatever it costs me, <…> As the life and health of the people who continue to fly the Superjet depend on it, I will continue to establish the real and credible reasons that contributed to the start of the tragic consequences,” said the pilot.
In 2020, Vadim Lukashevich, former designer of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, suggested that the pilots could be held responsible for the crash with the Sukhoi Superjet 100 in Sheremetyevo.
“The fact that the accident was the result of some kind of piloting errors,” said Lukashevich. In an interview with the National News Service. He added that the pilots’ first miss was to crash into a storm front where lightning struck the plane.
The aviation expert also described the Superjet 100 as “normal” and “the safest aircraft” and counted 13 lightning incidents at the same time. So Lukashevich commented on the version that the tragedy may have happened due to the mistakes of the specialists who designed the lining.
At the same time, earlier Lukashevich in a conversation with URA.RU spoke about the opposite – that the crew “worked like clockwork” at the time of the accident and that flights on the Superjet 100 ships had to be “suspended”.
December 2020 The newspaper “Kommersant” reportedIt was reported that the relatives of those who lost their lives in the plane crash filed a lawsuit in the Paris court against seven foreign companies that manufacture the aircraft’s instruments and systems, as well as the aircraft operator Aeroflot. According to the plaintiffs, the cause of the tragedy was “the aircraft’s failure to comply with airworthiness standards for lightning protection.”
The defendants in the case were the French companies Leach International Europe, Liebherr-Aerospace Toulouse SAS, Safran Landing Systems, Thales Avionics, PowerJet, L’Equipement et la Construction Electrique (ECE) and the American company Curtiss-Wright.
Total amount of requests approximately € 25 million Since summer 2022, the media did not report on the further progress of the disaster case.