A two-seater Ka-52 Alligator gunship crashed during a combat sortie, but both pilots were rescued.
Russian propagandist confirmed on his influential Helicopterpilot channel the crash of a Ka-52 attack helicopter, adding that pilots successfully ejected from the aircraft and landed safely.
“What happened, the committee will figure out. Yes, the helicopter was lost. The crew is alive,” the prominent pro-Russian military channel said.
Some sources reported that the crash was probably caused by a technical problem.
It is no secret that Russian Ka-52 helicopters are suffering from a major vibration issue when heavily loaded with weapons. Severe imbalance in the rotating parts of Ka-52 leads to instabilities during flight making control difficult, if not impossible. Severe vibration can also affect avionics and navigation equipment.
The War Zone also noted that often described as being fitted with ejection seats, the Ka-52 actually doesn’t have true ejection seats, but instead, a crew extraction system, which doesn’t rely on rockets to punch the seats out of the cockpit, but instead to drag them out.