On 25 November 2014, at minus 52°C in the Siberian town of Igarka, a group of passengers climbed off their bus, walked up to a Tupolev Tu-134 and pushed it along the icy apron. The video of oil workers shoving an airliner like a stalled car went around the world within days.
What happened at Igarka airport
The aircraft was a Tu-134 operated by Katekavia, a regional airline based in Krasnoyarsk. It was due to fly about 1,300 kilometres south from Igarka to Krasnoyarsk, a trip of roughly three hours, with 74 passengers, most of them oil workers, and seven crew on board.
After a night in temperatures around minus 52°C (minus 61°F), the brakes on the landing gear had frozen. A tow tractor could not get the plane moving on the ice, so the passengers were taken off. About 20 of them then got out of the airport bus and pushed the jet towards the taxiway while the tractor pulled. It worked: the flight left with almost no delay.
Katekavia's technical director gave shifting explanations, at one point blaming a parking brake left on and later saying the tractor had simply slipped. The airport director suggested the passengers had done it partly as a joke, a kind of group selfie.
Why the push alarmed prosecutors
Russia's West Siberian transport prosecutors confirmed that the brakes had frozen and opened an inquiry into a possible breach of safety rules. Oksana Gorbunova, a senior adviser to the prosecutor, pointed out that the plane moved because it was being towed. People alone could not have shifted an airliner of that weight, and by pushing on the wings they risked damaging the aircraft skin and the flaps.
That is the real lesson behind the funny clip. Aircraft surfaces are thin, carefully shaped aluminium, and flaps are moving control surfaces. Ground crews move planes with tugs and tow bars attached at designed points, never by hand on the wings.
Igarka: a port town above the Arctic Circle
Igarka sits on the east bank of the Yenisei River in Krasnoyarsk Krai, about 163 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle and some 670 kilometres from the river's mouth. Although it lies far inland, the Yenisei is deep enough here for seagoing ships, which made the town a gateway to the Northern Sea Route.
It was founded in 1929 as a sawmill and timber-export port and became a town in 1931. Logs floated down the Yenisei basin were cut and shipped from here, and by 1965 Igarka was the second-largest lumber-exporting port in the Soviet Union. Its darker history includes deportations and the Gulag: until 1956 much of the population was made up of deportees and prisoners, and thousands died building the abandoned Salekhard–Igarka railway between 1949 and 1953.
The sawmill closed in 2000 and the population has fallen from almost 24,000 in 1939 to a few thousand today. Igarka's airport stands on an island in the river, reached across the ice in winter and by boat in summer.
Cold weather and the Tu-134
Minus 52°C is extreme even for Igarka, but it is within the town's range: its record low is minus 55.5°C, against a summer record of 34°C. At those temperatures an aircraft parked overnight can freeze in place, exactly as the Katekavia jet's brakes did.
The Tu-134 was built for this kind of country. The twin-engine Soviet jet first flew in 1963, entered service in 1967 and was produced in 854 examples, typically seating 72 to 84 passengers. It served remote Russian routes for decades; Aeroflot retired its fleet in 2008, and the type made its last passenger flight in Russia in May 2019.
For a different cold-weather contrast, see winter temperature rankings explained. For more transport meeting deep snow, watch a Canadian freight train meeting deep snow.
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