Qualla: Aeroflot Flight 6515

Aeroflot Flight 6515: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The water beneath the Arabat Spit is so shallow that a person could almost wade across it, a vast silvery marsh of brackish lagoons called the Sivash, the Rotten Sea. On the night of 23 October 1978, this unlikely stretch of not-quite-sea became the resting place of Aeroflot Flight 6515. The Antonov An-24 had left Stavropol earlier that evening and was nearing Simferopol when ice built silently on its wings and engines. Ninety seconds after both engines fell quiet, the aircraft struck the marsh. All twenty-six people aboard were killed. They came to rest just two and a half meters below the surface, in water too shallow to hide them and too soft to give them up easily.

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Aeroflot Flight 6515: Ice in the Dark

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The trouble was the weather, and it crept up quietly. Over Stavropol the sky had been merely partly cloudy, visibility better than ten kilometers. But past Kerch the clouds closed into an unbroken deck, and as the airliner bored toward Simferopol at 2,450 meters, the icing grew s...

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Aeroflot Flight 6515: Ninety Seconds

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What followed happened almost too fast to grasp. At 19:40 both engines quit within three and a half seconds of each other and the propellers feathered automatically. The crew hauled the aircraft into a sharp left turn toward land, but an attempt to restart the left engine produce...

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Aeroflot Flight 6515: Raising the Wreck from the Rotten Sea

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Finding the aircraft was easy; recovering it was not. The wreck lay 24 kilometers southeast of the village of Yemelyanovka, submerged in barely two and a half meters of water. Beneath that thin layer, however, lay four and a half to five meters of soft silt, a swallowing muck tha...

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Aeroflot Flight 6515: What the Cold Taught

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every accident investigation is, in part, an attempt to make sense of loss, and this one carried a hard lesson. Investigators ran their own tests, deliberately icing engines and watching how the ice, once heat was applied too late, sheared off and choked the machinery. The patter...

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