The aircraft was registered ST-ARL, built in 1974 at the Aviant plant in Ukraine in the old Soviet Union, and operated by Alfa Airlines of Sudan. The crew came from four countries. Captain Gennady Semenov, a senior Russian pilot, flew the aircraft in command. His Sudanese first officer sat beside him. The 43-year-old navigator was Koshim Akram from Tajikistan. The 42-year-old flight engineer was Armen Virabyan of Armenia. The passengers were people most Sudanese recognised by face or name - a government on its way to mark a religious holiday in a part of the country that badly needed presence. None of them came home.

Early reports in the confusion after the accident described it as a helicopter crash. Some accounts suggested rebels had shot the plane down; rebel spokesman Arnu Ngutulu Lodi initially claimed responsibility, then retracted the claim, noting the aircraft had gone down outside rebel territory. Sudan's Civil Aviation Authority identified the cause more plainly. Visibility at the time was poor. Low clouds hid the terrain. The final investigation classified the crash as a controlled flight into terrain - a phrase that describes, coldly, what had happened: a serviceable aircraft flown, under human hands, into ground the crew could not see.

Five days after the crash, searchers recovered the flight recorders from the wreckage in the Nuba Mountains. Two days after the accident, Sudan's civil aviation chief Mohammad Abdul-Aziz tendered his resignation to President Omar al-Bashir. Bashir refused it, urging him instead to continue a newly approved reform programme. Sudanese officials had long complained that US sanctions on Khartoum made spare aircraft parts hard to obtain - that aging airframes and makeshift maintenance were a chronic hazard. Several deadly crashes in the preceding years bore them out. The Antonov that went down near Talodi was thirty-eight years old.

The range where the aircraft came to rest rises abruptly out of the flat southern Sudanese plains - a scatter of granite peaks and forested slopes home to dozens of Nuba ethnic groups. The mountains have been fought over for most of a century, caught between Khartoum and the movements that sought autonomy or independence for the Nuba people. Talodi, a market town of ten thousand or so, sits at their southern edge. In August the hills are green from the rains. In August they are also cloud-wrapped, which is how an aircraft can meet a mountain without its pilots ever seeing it coming.

The flight had been a small gesture - a delegation flying to join a holiday celebration in a difficult corner of the country. It ended with six aircrew from four nations and twenty-six passengers dead in a ridge of the Nuba Mountains. The Russian embassy, the foreign ministries of Tajikistan and Armenia, Sudan's state news agency - each mourned its own. So did the families in Khartoum who had expected their fathers and sons back by evening to break the fast together. In the years since, Sudan's aviation safety record has improved only in fits and starts. Thirty-two names remain on the list of those who did not return from a flight to a party.