For the sake of secrecy, the wrong airports were indicated as the point of arrival
We have learned new details of the events before the crash of Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane. Sources told how he and Wagner PMC employees behaved on flights on a business jet and how they transported weapons and ammunition.
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Earlier, MK found out that before the fatal flight on the Moscow-Petersburg route, starting on the twentieth of July, Prigozhin's Embraer Legacy aircraft was being repaired in an open parking lot at Sheremetyevo Airport. The reason for the repair was the breakdown of the turborefrigerator, which was not so easy to buy due to sanctions.
During this period, three people had official access to the aircraft: the technical director of the MNT-Avia company that owned the aircraft and two engineers.
A few hours before departure from Moscow on August 23, two strangers entered the aircraft. They were brought by co-pilot Rustam Karimov — he is on the list of the Federal Air Transport Agency and died in a crash.
Co-pilot Rustam Karimov got a job at the company that owns Prigozhin's plane a couple of months ago. He is from Perm. Source: social media
The man and woman presented themselves as potential buyers of Embraer Legacy, employees of RusJet. They examined the board for an hour.
In the evening, the plane with Prigozhin, Utkin, Chekalov and others headed for St. Petersburg. The last message from him came from stewardess Kristina Raspopova. At 17:40, she transmitted one short phrase: “Taxiing.”
According to MK, the founder of PMC Wagner Evgeny Prigozhin, who allegedly died in a plane crash, was unpretentious during air travel, but sometimes surprised the crew with his solutions.
In particular, the pilots were amazed that the two planes used by Prigogine had parachutes on a mandatory basis (the second plane also flew from Moscow, from Vnukovo to St. Baku).
The parachutes were loaded on both sides in the spring. This is a rather pointless undertaking from the point of view of pilots: in the event of a disaster, a parachute on board the aircraft is useless. However, Prigogine's demand was granted.
A high-ranking passenger never took alcohol on board. Of the drinks, there were only juice and cola, and Prigogine carefully monitored that the drinks were of domestic production. In food, he was extremely unpretentious: he could order, for example, scrambled eggs, and in the case of a short flight, he could do without food at all.
Evgeny Prigozhin and his people did not carry any special cargo. Most often, it was a change of clothes: the head of the Wagner went on a flight in jeans and a shirt, and then changed into camouflage.
The procedure for transporting weapons was strictly observed (recall that pistols were found at the crash site of an Embraer 135BJ Legacy 600, as well as, according to unconfirmed reports, grenades). Usually, the cartridges were taken out of the firearms, placed in a bag, sealed and handed over to the crew commander. After the end of the flight, the weapons were also returned to their owners.
Aircraft crews were given mobile phones with a closed communication channel. This was due, among other things, to the fact that Prigozhin himself periodically called the pilots. He was interested in the weather at the airport of arrival, asked if the plane would be treated with anti-icing liquid, etc.
The pilots remembered Prigozhin as a simple but demanding passenger who demanded respect. Once he reprimanded the crew commander for not cleaning the board. “Your plane is in shit,” the pilot remembered his phrase. At the same time, he treated the pilots with respect, always thanked them for the flight and shook hands.
The pilots themselves examined the aircraft very carefully before departure — both they and the passenger were careful about safety issues. In particular, Prigozhin demanded that the lists of passengers be destroyed after the flight.
Conspiracy was often observed in this way. For example, the plane with Prigozhin took off with the specified end point of the Zhukovsky Airport route, but instead landed at Pulkovo. Such «somersaults» caused dissatisfaction with the aviation services, and recently they tried not to abuse such tricks.