Avetik Muradyan, Chief of aviation department of RA armed forces, general-major, introduced documents of downed Azerbaijani MI-24G helicopter’s crew.

Notes have been taken in the notebook of one of the pilots, made on March 31, “Black box is yellow. It’s written: the pilot should fly the helicopter from Kala airport of Baku to military airbase of Kurdistan. It’s written that he performed 2 flights: 6 and 11 minutes each, totally 148 liters of kerosene have been consumed.

Further on it flew to Kyurdamir airport, with a period of 60 minutes. Total waste of kerosene comprised 798 liters and they got ready for the next flight. The next day a flight was planned from military airport to Zhdanovsk, which upon pilot call was named Beyladan.” In his words, total period of the flight comprised 35 minutes.

Introducing the map used by them, Avetik Muradyan said, 2 days before the flight, the pilot got instructions to perform a combat flight. Frontline of potential adversary is marked on the combat map, 9 targets in the territory of NKR are observed, the outermost destination was in the southeastern direction of Fizuli, “As a pilot, I can state, that implementation of the targets should have been done consecutively, out of the daily performance. 3km depth from the frontline was given as a primary assignment, then—10 km depth.”

According to him, the map was prepared on March 31 or April 1, “The adversary instructed army’s air force to get ready for attack in the night of April 1, in the southeastern direction of Nagorno-Karabakh. This is a proof, which, in my opinion, any military expert will accept and understand that the adversary performed development of military operations.”

In his words, the adversary performed a flight to the direction of target 54.

We may say for sure, that the pilot operated the gunship in a very tense condition, as a result of which, he didn’t fire the guided antitank missiles.

“The pilot pressed the trigger for about 2 minutes. And in that condition the helicopter was downed by our young men,” Avetik Muradyan said.

In Muradyan’s words, the downed helicopter is the modernized variant of Russian MI-24 modernized in South Africa, and partially in the Ukraine.

Artsrun Hovhannisyan, RA MOD Press Speaker, said this proves that the adversary planned to implement wide-scale military operations, otherwise air force won’t be engaged. Avetik Muradyan said that the pilot was considered a soldier performing a combat mission, and the soldier is given instructions 1-2 days earlier, “This means the mission was given by the head of the republic at least 10 days earlier.”

By Ofelia Hovhannisyan