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Kazakhstan suffered its second fatal plane crash in just over a month on January 29, when a domestic passenger flight arriving in Almaty crashed in bad weather, killing all 21 people aboard.
The SCAT Airlines Bombardier Challenger CRJ-200 crashed at around 1:00 p.m. as it was landing at Almaty airport in heavy fog, hitting the ground five kilometers outside Kazakhstan’s financial capital, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement [6]. The statement contained a preliminary list of the dead: five crew members and 16 passengers who were on the flight from the northern town of Kokshetau.
The prosecutor’s office said it had already opened a criminal case into the crash, the second in the space of just over a month: On December 25, a military aircraft crashed [7] near Shymkent, killing all 27 people on board. The dead included the acting head of Kazakhstan’s Border Service, Turganbek Stambekov, and other senior border officials.
An investigation [8] blamed technical failure combined with pilot error for that crash, which, like today’s disaster, occurred in bad weather. Kazakhstan’s airports are frequently closed due to adverse weather conditions, but – despite heavy fog blanketing the city on January 29 – Almaty airport was open for business.
Concerns are frequently aired about the safety records of Kazakh airlines. In 2009 the EU blacklisted [9] all the country’s airlines (including SCAT) with the exception of the flagship national carrier Air Astana, which says [10] it adheres to European safety standards. Air Astana is jointly owned by the Kazakh government and UK defense giant BAE Systems.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev was quick to express condolences [11] over the latest crash, and to order his government to get to the bottom of the cause, indicating that this second fatal air disaster in just over a month has put air safety firmly on Astana’s agenda.