Turkey: too early to say what caused deadly military plane crash

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ANKARA (Reuters) -Turkey’s defence ministry said on Thursday it was too early to say what caused the crash this week of a military cargo plane in Georgia in which 20 soldiers died, and inspections continue.

The C-130 cargo aircraft had left Azerbaijan for Turkey and crashed on Tuesday in an incident marking the NATO member’s highest military death toll since 2020.

At a briefing, the ministry said the expected official crash report would uncover the cause, and added that the aircraft was not carrying ammunitions on its last flight.

It was carrying a 10-person maintenance team for Turkish F-16s that had earlier taken part in Victory Day celebrations in Azerbaijan, as well as the flight crew and maintenance equipment, the ministry said.

Its last radio call was some 40 minutes before its crash. The black box – containing the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Data Recorder (CVDR) – was now in Ankara for analysis, it said.

Some analysts have said Turkey’s fleet of Lockheed Martin C-130s is old and needs renewing, despite the aircraft’s general reliability, and that the likely cause of the crash was a technical failure.

The ministry – which last month announced a deal with Britain to procure 12 C-130J aircraft that need to undergo modernisation and maintenance – said the crashed plane was bought from Saudi Arabia in 2012 and started flights in 2022 after undergoing modernisation.

Since then it was regularly used and serviced, the ministry said. Its last maintenance was one month ago.

All planned flights by Turkey’s 18 C-130 planes had been suspended pending inspections after the incident, the ministry added.

(Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu; Editing by Jonathan Spicer)