Flight 2306 was a scheduled domestic service from Vorkuta to Moscow, with a stopover in Syktyvkar, the capital of the Komi Republic. The aircraft, a Tu-134AK registered as CCCP-65120, had been manufactured in 1978 and had accumulated nearly 14,000 flight hours. Captain V. Dubrovsky commanded a crew of six, including co-pilot D. Kuleshov, flight engineer S. Shamyrkanov, and navigator Y. Dmitriev. When the flight departed Syktyvkar at 09:55, 86 passengers were aboard, including 19 children. Five passengers had boarded at the stopover, among them two Bulgarian loggers. All baggage from the Vorkuta leg remained in the rear cargo hold, uninspected — standard procedure under Soviet aviation guidelines at the time.

When the smoke alarm sounded, the captain sent his flight engineer aft to investigate. Shamyrkanov confirmed the fire was real — heavy smoke was pouring from the rear cargo compartment. But Captain Dubrovsky doubted the report and left the cockpit himself to verify, a violation of established procedures that cost the crew precious minutes. By the time he returned to his seat at 10:10, the Tu-134 had climbed to 5,600 meters and was 140 kilometers from Syktyvkar. The window for a straightforward return had already narrowed dangerously. Dubrovsky ordered the co-pilot and flight engineer to fight the fire while he and the navigator began an emergency descent back toward Syktyvkar, radioing air traffic control at 10:11 to report the situation.

The firefighting effort was doomed from the start. Shamyrkanov and Kuleshov fought their way toward the rear cargo compartment, but the smoke was so dense they became disoriented, discharging two of the aircraft's four fire extinguishers in the wrong location. Neither man wore an oxygen mask or smokehood. They returned to the cockpit at an altitude of 1,000 meters to report their failure. Meanwhile, smoke and toxic fumes had filled the passenger cabin. People were coughing, suffocating, bleeding from the nose and throat. Some passengers fainted from inhaling combustion products. The aircraft's ventilation, impaired by reduced engine power during the descent, could not clear the air. Below, clouds with a base at 500 meters obscured the ground, and rain reduced visibility to six kilometers.

Unable to locate Syktyvkar's runway — possibly because the aircraft was too low to receive the airport's radio navigation signals — Dubrovsky made the decision to attempt a forced landing and informed air traffic control. The Tu-134 broke through the clouds at 300 meters, then vanished from radar. For nine agonizing minutes, the crew searched for any clear space in the dense Komi forest. There was none. At 10:27, at an altitude of just 23 meters, the aircraft struck treetops on a heading of 60 degrees. It hit the ground 195 meters farther on. Both wings tore away and the fuselage split into three sections. Fuel from ruptured tanks ignited, starting a secondary fire that consumed most of the wreckage. Survivors were pulled through breaks in the fuselage, the cockpit door jammed so badly that flight attendants had to help the captain and flight engineer escape. Navigator Dmitriev was killed on impact. Shamyrkanov died shortly after being pulled from the wreckage. A helicopter spotted the crash site at 13:35, but it took 19 hours to rescue all survivors.

The post-crash fire destroyed so much of the aircraft that the investigation, which lasted five months and saw its chairman replaced midway through, never determined the exact cause of the cargo hold fire. Investigators ruled out hydraulic fluid leaks and electrical faults. Their best hypothesis pointed to an incendiary device or contraband flammable materials in the uninspected passenger baggage — luggage that had been loaded in Vorkuta without any search of its contents. Forensic examinations of the dead confirmed what the timeline suggested: several passengers had been killed not by the crash but by smoke inhalation, their lives ending in the cabin while the crew still fought to find a way down. Among the 54 who died were seven children.