Aviamotornaya (Moscow Metro)

Aviamotornaya Авиамоторная
Moscow Metro station
Location	Aviamotornaya Street Lefortovo District South-Eastern Administrative Okrug
Coordinates	55°45′09″N 37°43′09″E / 55.7524°N 37.7191°E / 55.7524; 37.7191Coordinates: 55°45′09″N 37°43′09″E / 55.7524°N 37.7191°E / 55.7524; 37.7191
Owned by	Moskovsky Metropoliten
Line(s)	8  Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya Line
Connections	Bus: 59, 59k, 125, 730, 759, 805 Trolleybus: 24, 45, 53 Tram: 8, 12, 24, 32, 37, 46, 50
Construction
Depth	53 metres (174 ft)
Parking	No
History
Opened	30 December 1979; 37 years ago (1979-12-30)
Services
Preceding station   Moscow Metro   Following station Ploshchad Ilyicha toward  Tretyakovskaya Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya Line Kalininsky radius Shosse Entuziastov toward  Novokosino
Route map Novokosino Novogireyevo yard Novogireyevo Perovo Shosse Entuziastov  14  (OSI) Aviamotornaya Ploshchad Ilyicha  10  Marksistskaya  5   7  Moskva River Vodootvodny Canal Tretyakovskaya  2   6  Moskva River Volkhonka  1  Plyushchikha  3  Moskva River Dorogomilovskaya Moskva River Delovoy Tsentr  4  Moskva River Park Pobedy  3  Minskaya Lomonosovsky Prospekt Ramenki Michurinsky Prospekt Ochakovo Govorovo Solntsevo Solntsevo yard Borovskoye Shosse Novoperedelkino Rasskazovka This diagram:
Location
Aviamotornaya Location within Moscow Ring Road

Aviamotornaya (Russian: Авиамото́рная) is a Moscow Metro station in the Lefortovo District, South-Eastern Administrative Okrug, Moscow, Russia. It is on the Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya Line. The station was opened on 30 December 1979.

The station is built in a three-vault configuration 53 metres (173 feet) underground. The central hallway contains a sculpture made out of anodised gold pyramids and tetrahedra. The architects of the station are A.F. Strelkov, V.I. Klokov, N.I. Demchinsky, J.A. Kolesnikov, and E.S. Barsky. The theme of Aviamotornaya is aviation and flying. The columns holding up the ceiling are glazed in a light marble tone. The floor is made up of granite plates coloured in different shades of grey. The wall at the end of the central hallway is faced in a metal sculpture. There are decorations mentioning and detailing the main constellations.

The escalators of the station caused a significant disaster on the Moscow Metro on February 17, 1982, that killed at least 8 people.

As evening rush-hour approached, escalator #4 was turned on at 16:30 Moscow time. As the first commuters began to use it to descend, a poorly-attached step came loose, completing the cycle of coming all the way down and then back up on the opposite end of the chain. At 17:00, as it passed the upper mechanism, it got stuck and deformed the upper working gears and rods. This broke the clutch between the driving gears of the engine, and the thread, now free to move in any direction, began to accelerate from the weight of the passengers. Automatically the engine was immediately turned off and the brakes were applied. However, the standard working brakes lacked the strength to stop the momentum of the thread (heavily laden with passengers at this rush-hour), or even to reduce its acceleration.

For such a case, all escalators are equipped with additional emergency brakes, and Aviamotornaya's escalators had received completely new models three months prior. Moreover, two days before the accident, there had been a routine safety check, which found that the emergency brakes were incorrectly configured throughout; after necessary amendments, a simulation deemed all of the four escalators' emergency brakes to be satisfactory. However, that was not the case; the chief mechanic in charge had lacked the correct instructions on how to install the new brakes (which were being introduced on all escalators in the Metro at the time) on the particular escalator model that Aviamotornaya had. The resulting wrong configuration in both mechanism and circuitry did not allow for them to automatically turn on. Even when the escalator supervisor saw that the thread had accelerated to 2.4 times faster than its maximum rate and attempted to manually operate the brakes, nothing happened. 110 seconds after it began, the accident was over.