A Turkish military plane crashed in Georgia on Tuesday, killing all 20 people on board in the Nato member’s deadliest military incident for half a decade.
The incident remains shrouded in mystery, with Ankara saying on Wednesday that it is too early to say what caused the crash of the C-130 cargo aircraft in Georgia’s Kakheti district – but that an impending crash report is expected to reveal the cause.
The flight had only just departed Azerbaijan for Turkey before it came plummeting down, with footage online showing the plane breaking apart in midair, causing its parts to hurtle towards the ground.
Turkey has now grounded all flights by its fleet of C-130 planes – just weeks after the defence ministry announced a deal with Britain to procure 12 C-130J aircraft that require modernisation work.
The Independent has spoken to experts, including a former C-130 pilot in the RAF, about what could have caused the plane appeared to shatter into pieces so quickly.
What is the C-130 Hercules and when did it crash?
The C-130 Hercules which crashed in Georgia was a 57-year-old military aircraft which had been flown regularly.
Its last radio call was some 40 minutes before its crash. The black box – containing the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Data Recorder (CVDR) – is now in Ankara for analysis, the defence ministry said.
The flight was carrying a 10-person maintenance team for Turkish F-16s that had earlier taken part in Victory Day celebrations in Azerbaijan, as well as the flight crew and maintenance equipment.
The model, which is used widely by air forces around the world, is a four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft capable of operating from unprepared runways.
At a briefing in Ankara on Thursday, the defence ministry said the crashed plane was bought from Saudi Arabia in 2012 and started flights in 2022 after undergoing modernisation.
Since then it was regularly used and serviced, the ministry said, with its last maintenance one month ago.
Turkey’s 18 C-130 planes have now been grounded, with all flights suspended pending inspections after the incident, the ministry added.
It comes weeks after Russian president Vladimir Putin admitted that his country’s air defences were responsible for shooting down an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan 10 months earlier on Christmas Day, killing 38. But there have been no indications so far – or explicit accusations – of Russian involvement.
Incident unfolded ‘rapidly’
With the information currently available, indications suggest that something happened to the aircraft “very, very rapidly”.
This is according to Daniel Gustafsson, a former airline pilot and Aviation Content Specialist at Flightradar24.
“We know that they did not have time to call for a May Day. We don’t see any indication of them using the transponder to call for an emergency as well. And as it was immediately put in a free fall, it indicates that something happened very, very, very rapidly.”
Scott Bateman, a former RAF pilot who flew the C-130 Hercules for 10 years, said that to see an airplane falling in the manner it did is “exceptionally rare”.
“To see an airplane falling as it was, split into three pieces but with the wing still in one piece, is exceptionally rare,” said Mr Bateman, who is also the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Hercules: The Story of an RAF Legend.
“The front of the aircraft has obviously broken off forward of the wing, yet the back of the aircraft has broken off behind the wing,” he added.
“Some catastrophic event has happened that has caused that. I wouldn’t like to speculate what that is, because I would have no idea. I have never seen anything like this before.”
Experts say a mid-air explosion is possible
European security expert Samuel Doveri Vesterbye, who is the director of the European Neighbourhood Council, said that aviation professionals had suggested it was “odd” that the aircraft split up before hitting the ground.
“Dozens of experienced pilots and aircraft engineers have watched the publicly-available-crash-video and explain that it’s odd that multiple aircraft pieces are falling to the ground, explaining there could have been an in-air-explosion,” he wrote in a post on X.
But Mr Bateman cast doubt over suggestions that the plane had exploded mid-air.
“If you look at an airplane that explodes, it generally breaks up around where it explodes. It would be very unusual for the back to come off and the front to come off and to leave the middle bit in one piece,” he said.
Mr Gustafsson said it could have exploded mid-air, with the evidence pointing to “some form of a catastrophic event” taking place.
“Something happened for sure, because it’s more or less [an] out of the blue spiral dive,” he added. “This is not normal. Now, something may have broken off and then the rest broke during the fall because of the forces. But what happened is very unclear.”
A mid-air explosion is possible, but it is unclear what could have prompted this.
It is “definitely not unheard of” for a catastrophic mechanical failure to be behind this type of instant crash, he said, adding that “things go very fast like this”.
Did the aircraft’s age play a role?
The C-130 Hercules is the “longest military aircraft in continuous production in the world”, Mr Bateman said, with more than 70 years of service.
Some analysts have said Turkey’s fleet of Lockheed Martin C-130s is old and needs renewing, despite the aircraft’s general reliability, and that the likely cause of the crash was a technical failure, Reuters reported.
“Airplanes don’t age in the same way as perhaps cars would,” Mr Bateman explained, adding that they “constantly get upgraded to bring them from to an acceptable standard for flying around today”.
“This is a very forgiving aircraft. It’s a very simple aircraft. It’s known non-combat record is exceptionally safe.”
Mr Gustafsson said the age of an aircraft in itself is “not a good indication” as to why an aircraft crashes.
“If you hear 57 years old in aircraft, you think immediately that this is really old. And yes, it is really old, but they’re usually very well maintained. And the Hercules itself, there are plenty of aircrafts flying worldwide that are around this age, so it’s not unheard of or uncommon,” he said.
