New audio is highlighting the final moments of the doomed Doomed Boeing 737-400 flight. The plane ended up exploding in a fireball in Lithuania earlier this week.
The Boeing flight had traveled from Germany to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. The crash occurred around 5:30 in the morning, just a mile away from the runway. The flight ended up coming in a dangerously low altitude and crashed into the ground, erupting in an inferno. However, you wouldn't know that the plane had any difficulty based on the audio between pilots.
There was no sign that the pilots had any issue with the plane. They provided no warning to ground control before the crash. The pilots even greeted air traffic controllers with "good morning" minutes before the crash.
However, right before the crash, the pilots went silent. Ground control failed to reach the pilots as they sent warnings their way. Air traffic controllers began to warn other planes to clear the area.
"Cancel your start-up, go back to your stand... we just got a crash of an aircraft on final... a Boeing 737," the tower controller said.
Meanwhile, Marius Baranauskas, head of the Lithuanian National Aviation Authority, noted that things were odd.
Flight Crashes
"In the recording of the conversation between the pilots and the tower, the pilots until the very last second did not tell the tower of any extraordinary event," he said. "We need to examine the black boxes to know what was happening in the aircraft."
Surprisingly, three of four people on the flight actually survived. But they were injured in the crash. One person died in the plane crash. "According to the initial version, the incident may be related to technical problems. However, it is too early to talk about anything more precise," head of the center Vilmantas Vitkauskas said.
Police Commissioner Paulauskas hasn't ruled out the crash being a terrorist act.
"The plane was due to land at Vilnius airport and crashed a few kilometres away," Renatas Pozela, the head of the firefighting and emergency services unit said. "It fell a few kilometres before the airport. It just skidded for a few hundred metres - its debris somewhat caught a residential house. Residential infrastructure around the house was on fire, and the house was slightly damaged, but we managed to evacuate people."
Meanwhile, State Security Department chief Darius Jauniskis said, "We cannot rule out the case of terrorism. We have warned that such things are possible, we see an increasingly aggressive Russia... but we cannot make any attributions or point fingers yet. It is premature to associate (the crash) with anything or to make any attributions. In the current geopolitical context, we look at every incident differently than before, but I ask you to refrain from jumping to conclusions."
