Tu-134 Losses
For the entire period of operation total in-service time of the Tu-134 aircraft had come to half a million hours, these airplanes made more than 250 000 landings in various airports of the Russian Federation and foreign countries. In terms of efficiency and reliability index K1000 this airplane has been recognized as fail-safe and almost infallible vehicle. The Tu-134 was generally regarded by pilots as a rugged, simple and dependable aircraft.
By the year 2011, twenty eight of the 852 Tu-134s built had been lost since the aircraft entered service in 1967. Of those, 26 have been lost in accidents, one shot down by ground fire in the Abkhazian-Georgian conflict in 1993 and one blown up by a terrorist bomb over Russia in 2004. The Tu-134 is sixth highest on the list of aircraft crashes by type according to AirDisaster.com, but that figure can be misleading, as it ignores the fact that an aircraft’s safety record is often as much down to the operator as the actual reliability of the aircraft. Many Tu-134s were operated by independent carriers which split off from the Soviet monopoly Aeroflot when the USSR broke up in 1991, many of which had a poor operating safety record. According to AirDisaster.com, most of the nine Tu-134s accidents since 1990 have been attributed to pilot error by flight crews in CIS nation-state airlines.
The Tu-134 was involved in one of the deadliest air catastrophes ever. Due to a flight control error, two Tu-134 aircraft collided on August 11, 1979, in the skies over Ukraine. As a result, 178 passengers and crew members were killed. The mid-air collision of two passenger aircraft in the skies over the Soviet Ukrainian city of Dniprodzerzhynsk on August 11, 1979 was one of the deadliest air catastrophes ever. The crash was caused by the mistakes of rookie dispatchers who sent two Tu-134 towards each other. As a result of the collision, 178 passengers and crew members were killed.
As with many other catastrophes in the Soviet Union, this one was at first able to be hushed up. However, among the victims were 17 players of the football team, FC Pakhtakor, which caused a huge scandal not only in the country, but also abroad. Two dispatchers were sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony, and one of them eventually committed suicide.
In the 2000s, the Tu-134 was in several disasters, after which they were planned to be withdrawn from circulation as passenger planes on regular lines. So, in March 2007, the Tu-134 of UTair Airlines crashed while landing at Kurumoch Airport in Samara, and six people were killed. After that, the Ministry of Transport announced that by 2015 the operation of aircraft of this model will be discontinued. In January 2008, the largest operator of the aircraft - Aeroflot - announced that it would decommission the Tu-134.
On June 21, 2011, the Rus-Air Tu-134 crashed while landing at Petrozavodsk Airport. As a result, 47 people were killed out of 52 on board. A few days later, the head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, Alexander Neradko, announced that only nine out of 90 Tu-134 aircraft that were in operation were equipped with collision warning systems and were in line with international safety standards. As a result, on July 13, 2011, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that President Dmitry Medvedev had made the decision "to gradually withdraw the Tu-134 and An-24 from regular air services from January 1, 2012.
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