Aviogenex Flight 130

The Tupolev Tu-134 is a twin-engined, narrow-body jet airliner built in the Soviet Union from 1966 to 1989. In 1968, Tupolev began work on an improved 72-seat Tu-134 variant. The fuselage received a plug for greater passenger capacity and an auxiliary power unit in the tail. As a result, the maximum range was reduced from km to . The upgraded D-30 engines now featured thrust reversers, replacing the parachute. The first Tu-134A flew on 22 April 1969 and the first airline flight was on 9 November 1970. The aircraft servicing Aviogenex Flight 130 bore serial number 1351205 and was registered as YU-AHZ. It had accumulated a total of only 111 airframe hours at the time of the crash. The plane was imported into Yugoslavia on 23 April 1971, and an airworthiness certificate was issued on 27 April. ==Passengers and crew==

There were 76 passengers and seven crew members aboard Flight 130. The flight was transporting British tourists travelling on holiday to Rijeka, the third-largest city in SR Croatia. Seventy-two passengers were British tourists, while the other 11 passengers and crew (7 crew and 4 passengers) were from Yugoslavia. One of the passengers aboard was Josip Pupačić, a popular Croatian poet at the time, who was flying back from London with his wife and daughter, following the latter's surgery. The captain and pilot flying was 41-year-old Miloš Markićević. He held an IFR rating and had 9,230 flight hours, 138 of which were on the Tupolev Tu-134A. The copilot and pilot monitoring was 34-year-old Stevan Mandić, who had 2,300 flight hours, with 899 hours in type. A trainee, Viktor Tomić, had 99 flight hours. He was supervised by 39-year-old flight engineer Ivan Čavajda, who had accumulated 7,500 flight hours, of which 1,373 were on the Tu-134. ==Crash==

The aircraft took off from Gatwick at 16:33 GMT, flight code JJ 130. The flight was uneventful despite poor weather conditions over Europe until the final approach to Rijeka Airport. After establishing communication with Rijeka ATC, the controller on duty passed meteorological info to the crew and warned them about cumulonimbus clouds above the Učka mountain range. Using their airborne radar, the crew managed to fly around the cumulonimbus, but were too high to catch the instrument landing system (ILS) glide slope. The aircraft flew over the airport, returned to Breza non-directional beacon (BZ NDB) and caught the ILS glide path and localizer normally. The crew followed the ILS glide path with a slightly increased speed. ==Investigation and conclusions==

The accident was investigated by the Yugoslavian Directorate General of Civil Aeronautics and was supported by the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch. The official report, released on 1 December 1973, found that as Flight 130 flew through the rain in dusk conditions, refraction of light on the cockpit windshield caused an optical illusion that made the runway seem closer and lower (by ) than it actually was. The illusion caused the crew to make a sharp correction applying nose-down input and reducing power to idle in the final phase of landing. The sharp nose-down input caused the aircraft to reach a speed of and to contact the runway at speed of with excessive forces (vertical load of 4g and horizontal load 1.5g) on the right landing gear that broke the right wing. The commission issued six recommendations, including the need for pilots to study possible illusions that could be encountered during landing in heavy rain. The only conclusion stated in the commission's official report is: "According to the opinion of the Commission this was an exceptional and complex case of many unfavourable circumstances which resulted in this ." There was no mention of pilot error. Pilot-in-command Miloš Markićević was found not responsible for the crash and he eventually returned to flying, but in business aviation. The investigators could not determine why the crew had failed to execute a go-around procedure during their obviously unstabilised approach. ==References==