from youtube comments:

@malyy5 The plane was made in 1982. Was in operation until 2005. 29th april 2011 the pilots were ordered to fly it to Samara for repairs. Due to imidiate breakage of automatic control system (АБСУ) right after the take-off the plane lost almost all controls. Pilots had to use the engines in order to make right or left turns. They are true professionals. My bow to them!



Truly amazing they landed that nightmare in one piece.

holy crap! what are burning for fuel in that thing, vodka!?


let's take a bus ride thru the Andes at night, next!

wow!

im gettin sick while watching this :S....

omg...unbelievable he could land that kind of paperplane..

imagine the people inside the plane....oh my...

Star and flag for a nice find, astracat!

That is some crazy looking flying going on there. I bet the crew wished that the plane had been built with ejection seats. I wonder what the smoke was from at the far end of the runway?

imagine the people inside the plane....oh my...

there were no people inside except pilots. The plane should have been transported to Samara for repair, but instead of expensive transporting by land somebody decided that it could fly all the way till the repair shop.

Originally posted by butcherguy I wonder what the smoke was from at the far end of the runway?

As I understood the plane rolled a little away from the runway after landing, maybe the smoke was related to that...
But in the end the plane and pilots were absolutely safe.

Originally posted by butcherguyI bet the crew wished that the plane had been built with ejection seats.

thats what i thought....or just parachutes.

BTW, even keeping in mind that the incident was awful it shows that soviet planes are not so bad, they are really flying even when all the automatics don't work. I've read that some other popular planes would just crash down in the same situation.

But anyway there was a law forbidding or going to forbid (don't remember exactly) using Tu-154 at all...

Originally posted by AstraCat

imagine the people inside the plane....oh my...

there were no people inside except pilots. The plane should have been transported to Samara for repair, but instead of expensive transporting by land somebody decided that it could fly all the way till the repair shop.

Originally posted by butcherguy I wonder what the smoke was from at the far end of the runway?

As I understood the plane rolled a little away from the runway after landing, maybe the smoke was related to that...
But in the end the plane and pilots were absolutely safe.

edit on 11-5-2011 by AstraCat because: (no reason given)

The smoke was visible while the plane was in the air on the first and second videos though.

I was wondering if they had crashed one already and decided to try a second on out.

Originally posted by AstraCat

imagine the people inside the plane....oh my...

there were no people inside except pilots. The plane should have been transported to Samara for repair, but instead of expensive transporting by land somebody decided that it could fly all the way till the repair shop.

The ferry flight was supposed to highlight any issues the aircraft had, so there was a reason the aircraft was being flown other than transport costs (which would have been cheaper anyway once you took into account the cost of the flight, plus the cost of insurance etc - this flight would have come to $30K or $40K easily.

DO A BARREL ROLL!!!!