Second day of mourning in the Bulgarian Army for the death of the two military pilots. Major Petko Dimitrov and senior lieutenant Vencislav Dunkin have repeatedly trained at the base in Dolna Mitropolia the flight that they had to present during the air show in “Graf Ignatievo“.
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The L-39 plane with the two pilots crashed during rehearsal for the show while they were performing an aerobatics stunt. There are three leading versions of the crash on which investigators continue to work - human error, technical malfunction or an incorrectly set command. The black box from the plane is about to be read in the Czech Republic.
According to experts, the plane of the two pilots was not at the required height before they started the performance of the demonstration figure. The conclusion is based on the footage that captured the fatal flight.
Turning the plane vertically down is accepted as part of the mission, says General Spas Spasov, who flew the L-39 "Albatross" and has performed many times the figure performed by Major Petko Dimitrov and Senior Lieutenant Vencislav Dunkin before they died.
"And that's part of the program, but not getting out of that descending part of the plane's trajectory, already there leads to a lot of questions and whether some technical malfunction has occurred, it could occur at any moment, no matter how new, modern the plane is," the reserve brigadier general is emphatic.
The minimum height at which such a figure is performed must be high enough so that, if a mistake is made, the aircraft can be controlled or the pilots can eject.
"What I'm seeing is that probably from a lower altitude - starting the ascending part of this figure that they're doing, at the top of that figure the plane is moving quite slowly, but that's a subjective judgment from my side and like other colleagues, we still don't know from this distance how it is photographed, what the speed is", said Spas Spasov - brigadier general from the reserve, former military pilot.
"It is possible that there, the leader in charge, overseeing this execution, like everyone else, may have given some command in this case, but the command cannot always be necessarily carried out if it leads to a dangerous termination of the flight. So - here we can talk about some kind of joint mistake, if there was such a command", believes the former military pilot Spas Spasov.
For military pilots, it is necessary to participate in aviation demonstrations, it is part of their training to master the aircraft and maintain training. The most trained pilots are involved in such flights.
"If this incident had happened on the first flight in preparation for the show, then I would have really wondered if they had made them do something that the pilots themselves couldn't do or the plane itself was incapable of doing, but there is no such thing, they have been training for a long time, even I have eyewitnesses to this thing who told me that in the area they observed how they were training exactly this similar flight, there in the Pleven region", added Spas Spasov.
A requirement for conducting air demonstrations is that aircraft do not fly over the audience.