The An-26 was a Soviet-designed military transport, built in 1982 and originally configured for cargo and troops. By the time it flew as PTK251, a 2012 overhaul had converted it for civilian passenger use — a common fate for Soviet-era transport aircraft across the former USSR, where aging military designs were adapted to fill gaps in regional aviation infrastructure. Registration RA-26085 had served multiple operators over its decades of service, including PermTransAvia and Air Mali International, and had been leased at times for United Nations operations. Kamchatka Air Enterprise had operated the aircraft since 2013. It flew about nine flights a week, each approximately two hours. It was, in every bureaucratic sense, a functioning aircraft operating a routine route.

Flight 251 departed at 12:56 local time and was expected at Palana just after 15:00. The aircraft passed through successive air traffic control centers without incident. Shortly before 14:10, the captain contacted Palana for weather information. Conditions were cloudy. The airline's own rules prohibited visual approaches from the sea side of the airport when cloud ceilings fell below 750 meters — so the controller directed the crew to approach from the land side, using navigation beacons. What happened next remained unclear for years. Radar contact was lost while the aircraft was on final approach, several kilometers from the runway. There was no report of a go-around. The An-26 struck a steep coastal cliff at 200 meters altitude — below the minimum altitude for that approach path and outside the proper approach corridor. The aircraft was completely destroyed on impact.

The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations dispatched a helicopter the same day. Search teams reached the site by evening, guided by a faint signal from an emergency locator transmitter. Wreckage was sighted at 21:00 local time. By the following day, 19 of the 28 bodies had been recovered by a team of 51 rescue workers. Countries including the United States, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, and Pakistan expressed condolences. The cockpit voice recorder was found but had been too badly damaged to yield usable data. The flight data recorder proved more valuable. The Interstate Aviation Committee, which investigates aviation accidents across the former Soviet space, worked the case for years. Their final report, released in 2025, classified the accident as controlled flight into terrain: the crew had not adequately monitored their altitude or sink rate during the approach. Investigators also noted an earlier accident at the same airport in 2012, when another aircraft attempted to land at Palana and crashed, and questioned whether safety recommendations from that accident had been fully implemented.

Palana is a difficult destination. The settlement sits at the edge of the Tigil coast, where the Kamchatka highlands meet the Sea of Okhotsk in a rugged jumble of cliffs and fog. The airport's approaches require precision, and the weather at Palana is unpredictable in ways that challenge even experienced crews. The 2021 crash was not the first time an aircraft had come to grief trying to land there. The remote communities of Kamchatka depend entirely on air transport — there are no roads connecting most of them to the rest of Russia. That dependency means older aircraft fly more frequently, routes are maintained regardless of difficult conditions, and the accidents, when they come, tend to involve people who simply had no other way to get home.