Funeral held for pilots and flight attendant of deadly air crash

STORY: :: Mourners honor two pilots and a flight attendant

who died in the Azerbaijan Airlines crash

:: Baku, Azerbaijan

:: December 29, 2024

Captain Igor Kshnyakin and co-pilot Alexander Kalyaninov, both ethnic Russians with Azerbaijan citizenship, and Hokuma Aliyeva, a flight attendant, were laid to rest in Baku.

Earlier on Sunday, they were given full honors at a memorial event at the Alley of Honor in central Baku attended by Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev and his wife, Mehriban.

The pilots have been lauded in Azerbaijan for landing in a way which allowed 29 people to survive but led to their own deaths.

The Embraer EMBR3.SA passenger jet had flown from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia’s southern Chechnya region, before veering off hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea.

The Alley of Honor is Azerbaijan’s most sacred modern burial ground – where prominent politicians, poets and scientists are laid to rest.