- Flight was landing at airport in Kazan when plane crashed
- Boeing 737 aircraft believed to have caught fire after crash landing
- Plane had taken off from Domodedovo airport in Moscow
- Officials say all on board, 44 passengers and six crew, were killed
- Newly-wed son of regional governor named among the dead
Horror: Emergency workers sift through the wreckage of a Boeing 737 which crashed and crashed and burst into flames while trying to touch down at a Russian airport, killing all on board
A Boeing 737 passenger airline on a domestic flight in Russia has crashed and burst into flames while trying to touch down at an airport, killing all 50 passengers and crew on board. The aircraft, belonging to Tatarstan Airlines had been attempting a second landing in the city of Kazan, when it crashed, officials have said. There were no immediate indications of what may have caused the crash, which left no survivors.
The ministry released a list of the dead, which included Irek Minnikhanov, 23, the son of Tatarstan's governor, and Alexander Antonov, who headed the Tatarstan branch of the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.
Mr Antonov was accompanying newlywed Mr Minnikhanov, son of Rustam Minnikhanov, who wed Frenchwoman Antonia Guichard just three months ago.
Reports said the plane appeared to lose altitude as it was making a second landing attempt, crashing and catching fire.
State television showed a nighttime photograph of firefighters at the side of the aircraft after the flames had been extinguished.
'The aircraft collided with the ground on its second attempt to land,' said an air traffic control source.
Another source said the plane had made three attempts to land and lost altitude quickly in high winds and cloudy skies.
Weather in the city soon after was reported to be light precipitation and winds of about 8 meters per second, or 18 mph.
The 23 year old plane 'hit the runway and burst into flames', said a source at Russia's Investigative Committee which has opened a criminal probe into the horror.
A fuel tank was said to have exploded as the plane came down.
Firefighters extinguished a blaze on the aircraft.
The plane, which took off from Domodedovo airport in Moscow, crashed at 7.20pm, or 3.20pm GMT, today, at the airport in Kazan, located in Tatarstan, in the in the west of the country.
Kazan, a city of about 1.1 million and the capital of the Tatarstan republic, is located on the Volga river, about 450 miles east of Moscow.
The republic is one of the wealthier regions of Russia because of its large deposits of oil. It is also is a major manufacturing center, producing trucks, helicopters and planes. About half of the people who live in the republic are ethnic Tatars, most of whom are Muslims.
A spokesman for the Russian Emergencies Ministry, Irina Rossius, said there were 44 passengers and six crew members aboard and all had been killed.
'The plane made several attempts to land,' she said.
'During the final attempt, one of the fuel tanks exploded.'
There was no suggestion that terrorism was behind the crash.
Ambulance workers rushed to the airport to help, but found no survivors among the wreckage.
Early reports blamed pilot error or a technical problem, but few details were available on the circumstances of the tragedy.
President Vladimir Putin has demanded a full investigation into the crash.
A journalist who said she had flown on the same aircraft from Kazan to Moscow's Domodedovo airport earlier in the day told Channel One state television that the landing in Moscow had been frightening because of a strong vibration during the final minutes of the flight.
'When we were landing it was not clear whether there was a strong wind, although in Moscow the weather was fine, or some kind of technical trouble or problem with the flight,' said Lenara Kashafutdinova.
'We were blown in different directions, the plane was tossed around. The man sitting next to me was white as a sheet.'
Russia has seen a string of deadly crashes in recent years. Some have been blamed on the use of aging aircraft, but industry experts point to a number of other problems, including poor crew training, crumbling airports, lax government controls and widespread neglect of safety in the pursuit of profits.
The last fatal airliner crash was in December, when a Russian-made Tupolev belonging to Red Wings airline careered off the runway at Moscow's Vnukovo airport, rolled across a snowy field and slammed into the slope of a nearby highway, breaking into pieces and catching fire. Investigators say equipment failure caused the crash, which killed five people.
A 2011 crash in Yaroslavl that killed 44 people including a professional hockey team was blamed on pilot error. And Russian investigators found that the pilots in two crashes that killed 10 and 47 people in recent years were intoxicated.
Source - Dailymail
0 maoni:
Post a Comment