It turned out who and how carried “foreign luggage”
In the investigation into the causes of the Embraer Legacy 600 plane crash on August 23, which killed the founder of the Wagner PMC Evgeny Prigozhin and 9 others person, special attention may be paid to luggage. We are talking not so much about the personal belongings of passengers, but about the parcels periodically transported by this board — much to the displeasure of the crew members. MK managed to find out who and how carried the “unofficial cargo” on board Prigozhin’s plane.
The fact that both Prigozhin’s sides were used not only as passenger, but also as postal, was known to all those who served «main passenger» (as Prigozhin was informally called among themselves).
The process of loading informal luggage on board was controlled by Andrey Oleynik, the manager responsible for security. He refused to answer our questions, but we still found out some of the nuances of this procedure.
Usually the request to the crew (in fact, it was a veiled order) sounded like this — it is necessary to transfer some kind of box from Sheremetyevo in Pulkovo. The driver had to meet the plane directly on the airfield of the St. Petersburg airfield, where the cargo was transferred to him.
Crew members, of course, were strictly prohibited from examining the contents of the boxes. However, the role of couriers was performed by the pilots and flight attendants. None of the passengers touched these boxes, and the transfer of the cargo to the driver at the destination airport took place after everyone, including Prigozhin, had left the board. The pilots were not enthusiastic about this mission, but they could only accept it.
At the same time, the cargo itself differed in both appearance and dimensions. Sometimes these were gifts (for holidays) — boxes packed in a gift bag, sometimes just boxes or envelopes with A4 papers. Boxes were usually placed in the luggage compartment of the plane, packages — right in the cabin.
The procedure itself looked like this. The luggage was brought to the territory of terminal «A» airport Sheremetyevo, where a car can enter only with a pre-ordered pass.
Next, the load was placed for primary control — it was passed through the HI-SCAN introscope. For some time, the cargo remained in the terminal waiting for Prigozhin and his companions.
When information was received that the passengers had moved towards Sheremetyevo, the cargo was taken by the pilots, again undergoing inspection and accompanied by a handling agent (the person who regulates the entire procedure for servicing the aircraft) the airport aviation security service drove to the aircraft in a car. By the way, the handler must accompany the crew while moving around the field.
A similar strict procedure applied to passengers. Even if Prigozhin arrived at Sheremetyevo by helicopter — and this happened most often — he could not simply move from one aircraft to another, even if they were standing 50 meters from each other. All passengers were taken to the terminal by car, went through security checks and then drove to the plane by car. An aviation security representative was usually on duty near the plane.
During the entire procedure for receiving and inspecting “unofficial cargo” Oleinik was usually present. This was the case during the last Embraer Legacy flight from Sheremetyevo on August 23. However, he usually did not monitor the placement of luggage on the plane — this is the prerogative of the pilots. The pilots note that for several years — Oleynik worked for Prigozhin for quite a long time — no incidents with parcels occurred.
The luggage compartment of the Embraer Legacy aircraft deserves special mention. The aviators themselves joke that you can “at least put an elephant in there.” Usually the compartment contains plugs for the engine, blankets from the cabin, things, kitchen utensils (for example, trays), light furniture, the notorious parachutes, the presence of which Prigozhin was so concerned about. That is, in theory, it was possible to hide some foreign object there that would affect the normal course of the flight.
The pilots with whom we had the opportunity to talk still consider the version of a local explosion on board the aircraft near the floor on the right side of the fuselage to be the most likely. “Levshin (Alexey Levshin — the crew commander who died along with Prigozhin) would have pulled out the plane in case of any hardware failure. Even with a minimal percentage,” his colleagues say confidently. — Let’s assume a strange version: everyone on the plane fell asleep, the engines were running at low throttle, the plane was flying in autopilot mode, hypothetically fell into a tailspin and no one reacted to it. But the speed small, which means the plane will simply fall completely intact. It will not burn in the air and fall apart in the air. There is no such oncoming flow that it begins to fall apart.»
At the same time, aviators advise not to get hung up on the turbo refrigerator, which, we recall, was changed two days before the disaster. “This is a working system, it will not function if something extraneous is introduced there,” experts believe. The engineer was responsible for replacing the unit. «MNT-aero» Sergei Kitrish, who is a witness in a criminal case. However, he is also considered a specialist with an impeccable reputation: “He would not have released the plane with even the slightest malfunction.”
However, the investigation will most likely actively work out the version of the human factor — the most popular in the investigation of plane crashes. Moreover, there are even formal prerequisites for this.
It has already been established that Prigozhin’s crew was very exhausted. Working hours established by the Federal Aviation Regulations were not followed. In addition, the pilots were under constant stress due to frequent flights to airfields closed to ordinary ships, located in close proximity to the air defense zone. These factors, in particular, became the reason for the dismissal from MNT-aero. in the spring of 2023, crew commander Sergei Korobchinsky.
But either the officials of the Federal Air Transport Agency were not aware of the problems of the MNT-aero pilots, or Prigozhin’s influence was enough to turn a blind eye to violations. Now this information will hardly be useful to aviation inspectors, since after the disaster the company virtually ceased to exist.