The Superjet 100 was supposed to be Russia's comeback. Manufactured by Sukhoi Civil Aircraft, it was the first new production airliner to emerge from the Russian aviation industry since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The 'Welcome Asia!' demonstration tour was designed to showcase the jet to prospective buyers across the continent. A successful demo flight had already taken place in Kazakhstan, but trouble followed the tour. In Pakistan, potential buyers could only view the plane on the ground -- a technical glitch prevented any flight. On the way to Myanmar, a leak was found in an engine nozzle, and that aircraft had to return to Moscow. The plane that would crash into Mount Salak was a replacement, serial number 95004, built in 2009 with just over 800 flight hours logged. At the time, Sukhoi held 170 orders worldwide, 42 of them from Indonesian carriers alone. The company harbored ambitions to eventually build 1,000 of the type.

Mount Salak rises to 2,211 meters south of Bogor in West Java, its slopes cloaked in dense tropical forest and frequently shrouded in cloud. Between 2002 and 2012, seven aviation accidents occurred in the mountain's vicinity. An Indonesian Air Force aircraft crashed there in 2008, killing 18. A training aircraft went down not long before the Superjet accident, killing three more. The pattern was grimly consistent: high turbulence, rapidly shifting weather, and mountainous terrain that could vanish behind clouds in minutes. On the day of the crash, the SSJ-100 departed from Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in Jakarta for what was meant to be a short local demonstration loop. At 2:26 PM local time, the crew requested descent from 10,000 to 6,000 feet. Two minutes later, they asked to 'orbit to the right.' Thick cloud cover obscured the mountains ahead. The aircraft struck the edge of a cliff at 6,270 feet, slid down a slope, and came to rest at 5,200 feet in terrain so rugged that rescuers could not reach the site until the following day.

The captain was Alexander Yablontsev, 57 years old, a former Russian combat pilot, test pilot, and cosmonaut who had worked on the Buran space program and flown the Superjet 100's maiden voyage in 2008. His first officer was Alexander Kotchetkov, 44, and the flight navigator was Oleg Shvetsov, 51. The investigation that followed -- led by Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee, with the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder both recovered from the wreckage -- revealed a damning sequence of events. In the minutes before impact, the crew had been engaged in conversation with prospective customers who were present in the cockpit. When the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System activated, alerting them to rising terrain ahead, the pilots concluded the system was malfunctioning. They turned it off. The aircraft was in full working order. Every warning functioned exactly as designed. The final report, released December 18, 2012, attributed the crash to human error: the crew's failure to maintain awareness of the terrain, compounded by distraction from non-essential conversation during a critical phase of flight.

Among the dead were 14 representatives from the Indonesian airline Sky Aviation, which had been considering a fleet order. Captain Aan Husdiana, director of operations for Kartika Airlines, was aboard. Five journalists had joined the flight: Dody Aviantara and Didik Nur Yusuf from Angkasa aviation magazine, Ismiati Soenarto and Aditya Sukardi from Trans TV, and Femi Adi from Bloomberg News. Peter Adler, an accomplished American pilot serving as a consultant, held a US passport. Two Italian nationals and a French citizen of Vietnamese descent were also on board. These were not anonymous passengers on a routine flight. They were aviation professionals, journalists, and industry leaders -- people whose careers were built on understanding the risks of flight, gathered together because they believed in the promise of a new aircraft.

In the aftermath, Sky Aviation delayed delivery of 12 Superjet 100s. Kartika Airlines signaled that its order for 30 aircraft would likely slip. But within days, Sky Aviation reversed course, stating the planes were still needed to connect Indonesia's sprawling archipelago. Mexico's Interjet said the crash had no influence on its purchasing plans. Aeroflot and Armenia's Armavia, the only two operators at the time, continued flying the type without interruption, though Armavia would cease operations entirely by 2013 for unrelated financial reasons. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev convened an investigation commission the day after the crash. Indonesia firmly retained jurisdiction, declining Russia's request to have the flight data recorder sent to Moscow. The mountain, indifferent to politics and commerce, continued to generate the turbulence and sudden weather that had claimed aircraft before and would likely claim them again. A mural in the city of Surakarta commemorates the accident -- a quiet acknowledgment that forty-five people trusted a machine and its crew, and both the trust and the crew failed at the worst possible moment.