State commission to investigate Vietnamese plane incident
MOSCOW, July 13 (RIA Novosti) - A special state commission will conduct a ten-day investigation into yesterday's incident involving a Vietnamese passenger jet, an official from Russian air traffic control said Wednesday.
Vladimir Mikhailov, the supreme commander of Russia's Air Force, said the incident had already been cleared up.
The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier that a Boeing 777 belonging to Vietnam Airlines had violated Russian air space Tuesday morning.
The plane was flying from Hanoi to Moscow. However, a Defense Ministry official said the flight had not been included in the international schedule by Russia's main air traffic control body.
Russian air defense controllers had not sanctioned the border crossing and so concluded that the plane was an intruder. Fighter planes and air defense missile units were placed on alert.
The military instructed commercial air traffic controllers to lead the plane out of Russia's air space. However, the instructions were not followed, and the Boeing successfully landed at Domodedovo airport in Moscow.
Vietnam Airlines said the plane had not violated Russian air space. Company spokesman Nguyen Chang said the airline regularly flew from Vietnam to Russia and that the relevant Russian organizations had long sanctioned these flights. He said that Vietnam did not understand what had happened. Vietnam has asked Russia to investigate the incident and provide an explanation.
Vietnam Airlines, a state-run company, has been running regular non-stop flights from Vietnam to Russia since 2002. Planes fly from Hanoi to Moscow twice a week and from Ho Chi Minh once a week.
The Russian Defense Ministry admitted that the incident was caused by lack of coordination between civilian and military services, and the lack of a single governing body.
Mikhailov said that a federal air navigation service would be set up to prevent such incidents from happening again. It will be subordinated to the government, and will bring together commercial and military traffic controllers.