A Fatal Decision to Fly Home

KYIV, Ukraine, January 12th, 2020

The last time Kristina Aleksandrovych saw Ihor Matkov was on January 5th, three days before his plane was shot out of the sky by an Iranian missile.

As they talked over coffee about work, life and everyday problems, Ihor – a 34-year-old flight attendant for Ukraine International Airlines – turned serious.

“I’m worried about this flight,” Ihor told Kristina, an outgoing businesswoman. Once his civil wife, she remained his close friend.

Worry was out of character for the cat-loving weightlifter, who’d worked for UIA his entire adult life. Kristina tried to calm him down.

“‘When do you need to fly?’ I asked, and he said ‘The day after tomorrow, on January 7th,’” Kristina told me at her home in Ivankovychi, a hamlet 15 miles south of central Kyiv. “I said ‘By the day after tomorrow, maybe everything will become normal and calm down.’”

On January 7th – Christmas in Orthodox Christian countries like Ukraine – Ihor flew to Tehran, expecting to return to Kyiv the next day. He called her three times that night from Iran. It was strange, she said: they rarely talked so much any more.

Just before takeoff, he called again. She thought he sounded afraid. “I could hear something in his voice. When you’ve lived with a person for so many years, you can hear everything in their tone of voice.”

She asked Ihor to text as soon as he landed the next morning. He said he would.

When she woke up the next day, instead of a message from Ihor, she saw five missed calls from his mother. She immediately knew something was wrong.

“I thought, ‘Oh God, what has happened?’” Kristina said.

Flight PS752 from Tehran to Kyiv was packed with students of Iranian descent returning to Canada, a handful of businesspeople and tourists looking for convenient fares to Iran via Europe, and a 9-member Ukrainian flight crew.

The plane, a Boeing 737-800, was originally supposed to take off at 5:15 a.m. local time from Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran. Its intended flight path would take it almost due north, on a four-hour-and-45-minute flight to Kyiv.

Earlier that evening, between 2:15 a.m. and 2:45 a.m. local time, Iran fired 22 ballistic missiles at U.S. military bases in Iraq.

The sole official warning of increased risk to airliners was issued at 3:37 a.m. Iran time, and came from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which issued a “Notice to Airmen” prohibiting U.S.-based carriers from flying near Tehran “due to heightened military activities and increased political tensions in the Middle East.”

The NOTAM, a standard notice issued by the FAA to alert pilots of potential hazards along their routes, added that the tensions “present an inadvertent risk to U.S. civil aviation operations due to the potential for miscalculation or mis-identification.”

Iran’s aviation authority issued no equivalent warning, nor did any other country. Although this was the most serious confrontation between Washington and Tehran in decades, and potential military retaliation for any attack by Iran on American interests had been publicly announced by the U.S. president, Iran did not close its airspace to commercial traffic.

Civil aviation remained active across the country, and Ukraine Airlines Flight PS752 was one of more than a dozen flights taking off from Khomeini International that morning. Its senior pilot was Captain Volodymyr Gaponenko, one of UIA’s most experienced aviators. Volodomyr was flying one of the airline’s newest planes, with an augmented crew.

Prior to leaving for the round-trip to Tehran from Kyiv, Volodymyr’s wife had been deeply concerned about his upcoming flight.

“Of course I had some misgivings. There were lots of them. I asked him not to fly. I asked him not to do it,” Katerina Gaponenko told Sky News. “But he said something you can’t take back: ‘If not me, then who? If I’m on duty, it means the flight is scheduled, and I’m flying.’”

Still, she added, “I asked him to stay.” But he flew anyways.

The flight from Kyiv to Tehran had been without incident. But by its scheduled departure time in the early hours of Wednesday, the fully loaded plane was over its intended weight. Volodymyr requested a delayed departure in order to make the necessary adjustments to the plane’s fuel and load, in order to comply with takeoff regulations and ensure the safety of his flight.

The tower acknowledged the delay, and finally granted the plane permission to take off at 6:12 a.m.

The plane raced down the runway into the predawn darkness and took to the air, heading north along its intended flight path.

Its last recorded communication with Iranian Air Traffic Control immediately after takeoff was just a normal procedural transmission, according to UIA vice president Igor Sosnovsky.

At 6:14 a.m., the plane lost communications and disappeared from radar, according to public flight tracker data confirmed by UIA.

PS752 had gone down.

At about 5:45 a.m. in Kyiv, which is 90 minutes behind Tehran, Yevhen Dykhne’s cellphone started ringing in the winter darkness. Even though his phone was on silent, Dykhne hadn’t been sleeping well, and when he noticed it buzzing he answered.

“It was the head of our IT Department,” Yevhen, the chief executive of Ukraine International Airlines said. “Somebody had told him American media was saying our plane had been shot down.”

Yevhen, who spoke to me at the company’s office in Boryspil International Airport near Kyiv, was exhausted but focused as he talked about his company’s reaction to the tragedy, which had put his company at the center of a geopolitical conflict in the Middle East.

“The first thing I did was activate our Emergency Response Plan,” Yevhen said as he set his cup of coffee down, pausing as he stared at it blankly. “We’ve never used it at our company before.”

It was the first crash of a UIA flight in the history of the company, and Yevhen – a career transport industry executive who took the helm of the troubled airline four months ago – was taking the unfolding tragedy hard.

“For me, it was such a shock. I didn’t know the crew personally. I started working at the company not so long ago. We have 40 planes and more than 2,600 staff,” Yevhen said. “But as CEO I bear responsibility for everything that happens with the company.”

UIA is a troubled company, having lost nearly US$108 million in 2018 and consequently having been forced to freeze an international expansion plan in 2019. Yevhen – known for his ability to manage business crises – was brought in to help turn the company around.

Now he was facing the most serious crisis in his company’s history, and it was one that had claimed 176 lives.

By his own logic, if what happened on his watch was his responsibility, it wasn’t yet clear whether the deaths of his crew and passengers were ultimately his fault.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash, a series of conflicting statements and theories were advanced by various parties involved, including a technical malfunction, an accidental shoot-down by one of the belligerents in the region, or even a terror attack.

Ukraine, which was not a party to the hostilities between Iran and the US, quickly scrambled a team of investigators and pushed the Iranian authorities to give them access to the crash site, Ukrainian officials said.

Once the team was on the ground, it was quickly able to determine that the airliner did not crash because of a technical malfunction or pilot error, according to Ukrainian officials. It was obvious that the plane had been brought down by a missile.

Two minutes after take off, according to information from UIA and preliminary findings from investigators provided to me by Ukraine’s National Security Defense Council (NSDC), an Iranian air defense battery fired several anti-aircraft missiles at the airliner.

“Unfortunately, one missile would not be enough to cause such a catastrophe,” NSDC Secretary Oleksiy Danylov told me in a private briefing inside Ukraine’s Presidential Office.

The first missile appears to have struck the aircraft directly beneath the cabin, killing the entire flight crew immediately. Without its crew and flight deck, the airliner would’ve become flying wreckage, even if it had not been hit by additional missiles, destroying its engines.

What destroyed PS752 appears to have been the Tor anti-air missile system, a Russian-made weapon system designed to destroy fast, agile fighter aircraft and combat helicopters. The effect of even a single Tor missile on a civilian airliner would have been devastating: moving at nearly three times the speed of sound, 33 pounds of high explosives would have sent fragments of metal ripping through the thin aluminum skin of the Boeing 737.

The plane’s remnants crashed to the ground about nine kilometers from the airport.

All of its passengers and crew had been killed.

Kristina met Ihor on a flight from Rome to Kyiv ten years ago.

She was seated in business class, reading a magazine prior to departure as the flight crew gave its safety briefing. She wasn’t really paying attention, until the voice of the person giving the briefing paused suddenly. She looked up and saw Ihor, who was demonstrating safety features.

“He was standing two meters from me, and looking at me like this... and I couldn't take my eyes off his gaze. And even my heart stopped beating,” she said. “When I saw him, right at once I thought I should make his acquaintance.”

She made up an excuse to talk to him, and initiated conversation. Soon they exchanged phone numbers.

“As soon as I left the plane and boarded the bus to the terminal, I received my first text message from him,” she said.

Before long, their romance started and they moved in together. Ihor became a foster father to her son, and her civil husband. They lived together for nine years.

Ihor had a soft-spot for stray cats, and brought several home. Of the six cats that live with Kristina and her son, most were brought home by Ihor.

He also had ambition. In his spare time, he began studying to become a pilot. Kristina encouraged him, even using her savings to help him earn his Commercial Pilot’s License.

“It was our mutual dream,” she said. “Everything that he studied, I studied along with him. Sometimes I was saying ‘I could go with you to job interviews, because now I know so much.’” 

Ihor applied for a job as a pilot at UIA, Kristina said. Although he passed the rigorous tests to become a pilot, there were no openings, and he was told to try again at a later date, and was put on the reserve list. He continued working at UIA as a Senior Flight Attendant.

Despite eventually ending their relationship, the two remained on close terms, and Ihor still regularly called Kristina’s now 13-year-old son Oleksiy to talk to him and encourage him to study hard in school.

The last time Ihor spoke to Oleksiy was the night before he flew to Tehran.

“He did everything a birth father would do,” Kristina said. “Oleksiy got attached to Ihor so much, he would have ‘followed him through fire and water.’”

On the morning of January 8th, Kristina saw the missed calls from Ihor’s mom and knew something terrible had happened. She searched flight information at Boryspil International Airport and saw that Ihor’s flight had been canceled.

She knew immediately what it meant, and braced herself as she called Ihor’s mom back.

“She was crying and saying, ‘The plane crashed, Ihor died, everybody died,” Kristina said. “I didn’t want to believe her.”

Finally she spoke to a friend of Ihor’s, another flight attendant at UIA.

“Kristina... It’s true,” he told her.

Ihor was gone.

As a long-time veteran of the tourism industry, Kristina said she understands the complexities of the airline industry, and the pressures to keep planes in the air and on schedule. But she is struggling to understand the decision to keep flying despite tensions in the region.

“Again, it wasn’t just Ihor who was afraid to fly. The captain was afraid to fly. His wife wanted to talk him out of flying. [Ihor] wasn’t the only one,” Kristina said.

“This could have been any aircraft, from any country,” Yevhen, the UIA chief executive, said. “That night and early morning, dozens of other fights from different countries around the world used the same route as our plane.”

Andriy Guck is one of Ukraine’s foremost aviation lawyers. He has represented almost every air carrier in the country except Ukraine International, even representing one of UIA’s competitors in a lawsuit against the company over access to flights to Tehran.

But he doesn’t blame UIA for not cancelling the flight.

Instead, he places the blame on three parties: the Iranian aviation authorities for not closing their airspace; the United States for not issuing a more detailed and strongly worded NOTAM in the aftermath of the Iranian missile attack; and the Iranian military for lacking the proper training, equipment and procedures to determine the difference between a civilian airliner and a military aircraft or cruise missile.

Guck also thinks that the crew of PS752 made the only decision that they could have made with the information available to them. Without any way to know what the next development might be in the conflict between the US, but with the airspace was open and lacking any specific international warnings to fly, it made sense to him that Captain Volodymyr would decide to leave, as several other pilots from multiple countries decided that day.

“If you were in such a situation on the ground, what would you choose: to fly or not?” Guck said.

Kristina said she understands that airlines need to make money, and she was struggling to understand the decision to keep flying in that context. Still, she said, “I think that no amount of money is worth human lives.”

On Tuesday, January 14th, 2020, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) adopted a statement calling on Iran to take full responsibility for the shooting down of the airliner and the deaths of all onboard. It also called on the international aviation community to assert better control of risk management over conflict airspace.

“The crash of a plane over Tehran indicates a problem with the organization of civil aviation movements over Iran, so the International Civil Aviation Organization should assess the risks of civil aviation to prevent such tragedies.”

For Guck, this continues to be an issue that has broad implications.

“This is a global problem. No one is capable of doing the risk assessment in a few hours, even in such an obvious conflict as Iran. That’s why only Iran could have been responsible for closing its airspace at first,” Guck said.

“There were only two countries that knew the real danger of this situation: the US and Iran. The US secured the safety of only its own airlines. That was probably not very ethical.”

When the Iranians finally admitted that they had shot the plane down, Yevhen was relieved that it affirmed what he had been saying from an early stage based on preliminary, non-disclosable information he had received from investigators on the ground: the crew and their aircraft were not responsible for the crash.

But the airline executive remains haunted by their deaths.

“I can tell you that the loss of these young men and women have been much harder for me to take than even the loss of my own father,” Yevhen said. “At my father’s funeral, I understood it was the logical end of his 82-year life. I had no sense of injustice, like in this tragedy.”

Kristina’s grief is raw, but she is trying to let go of her initial outrage.

“There is a little anger inside, but mostly it’s just wishing that this had never happened.”

Besides, she said, she prefers to remember their romance together.

“I was always saying that we met in the sky.”

“‘You are my angel,’” Kristina said. “‘You are my angel with wings.’”

By Mac William Bishop, Oksana Parafeniuk & Veronika Melkozerova