A strange banging sound, chaos and prayers before a plane crashes

TBILISI, Georgia — At first, there was a strange banging noise outside the plane. Then, while one flight attendant was standing in the cabin, something hit his arm, cutting it. The passengers, sensing something was terribly wrong, began panicking. Some began praying.

One passenger recalled thinking it would be the last prayer of his life. Then, silence.

The anxious and chaotic scene on board Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was described by two flight attendants — Zulfugar Asadov and Aydan Rahimli — and a passenger, Subhonkul Rakhimov, in interviews with The New York Times on Friday and with an Azerbaijani TV station.

They were among the 29 survivors from the plane that set off Wednesday with 67 people on board from Baku, Azerbaijan, en route to Grozny, Russia, and that crashed in a ball of black smoke and orange flames on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan. The pilot was among those who did not survive.

Officials from three countries — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia — have opened investigations into the cause of the crash.

From his hospital bed in Baku, recalling the terror of the flight, Asadov said in a phone interview, “Thank God I’m alive.”

He and other survivors said the plane ran into trouble near Grozny. The aircraft, an Embraer 190, had made three attempts to land in the city, in Russia’s Chechnya republic, according to Asadov. And then it began acting weirdly.

Data received from the plane showed that its vertical speed oscillated more than 100 times during the final 74 minutes of flight, according to Flightradar24.

After he heard the peculiar sound outside the plane’s fuselage and his arm was cut — by what he does not know — Asadov said he took a towel and bandaged it tightly.

Rahimli, the other flight attendant who survived, helped Asadov treat his arm, he said. She told Xezer Xeber Azerbaijani television network that she had heard two bangs outside the airplane and that fragments had penetrated the cabin.

On Friday, Azerbaijan Airlines said the preliminary results of the Azerbaijani investigation showed that the plane had suffered “physical and technical external interference.”

While U.S. intelligence agencies do not have definitive information yet, U.S. officials have said there are preliminary indications that the plane was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft system, mostly likely a surface-to-air missile.

Shocked by the impact on the plane, some passengers stood up in panic, the witnesses said.

Rakhimov, the passenger, said in a Reuters interview from a hospital in Baku that he, too, had heard a bang. After he saw the plane’s fuselage was damaged, he said, he expected the aircraft to collapse. He began to pray.

“I thought that was my last prayer,” Rakhimov said.

Miraculously, the plane continued flying.

Rahimli and Asadov were sitting in the back, they said, talking to other flight attendants over the phone. Then, the plane crashed.

Rakhimov, describing the impact, said he was hit and his body twisted over and over again. Suddenly, there was silence, he said, until people around him began to moan, presumably in pain from their injuries.

“I realized that we have landed,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do — whether to laugh or cry.”

On Friday, Azerbaijan Airlines said it had suspended regular flights to eight Russian cities. It has also stopped flights to Makhachkala in neighboring Dagestan.

Investigators from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia are looking into the cause of the crash. In Azerbaijan, investigators have said they believe that a Russian Pantsir-S1 air-defense system damaged the plane, according to two people in Baku who were briefed on the inquiry and spoke anonymously because the investigation was ongoing. In a statement, Rosaviatsia, the Russian aviation agency, said it had offered full cooperation into the investigation.

After the crash, Rakhimov said he was lucky: He had been sitting in the back of the plane. The aircraft’s front end had received most of the impact, but the tail end had been sheared off, videos and images from the crash show.