44 dead in Russia plane crash: official

Published : Jun 21, 2011 - 09:33 Updated : Jun 21, 2011 - 14:04

MOSCOW, June 21, 2011 (AFP) - Forty-four people were killed and eight badly injured when a plane crashed onto a highway and burst into flames in northern Russia, narrowly missing an inhabited area, officials said Tuesday.

The RussAir Tu-134 tried to stage an apparent emergency landing in poor weather conditions just before midnight on a motorway two kilometres (1.25

miles) from its destination of Petrozavodsk airport in the Karelia region.

But the 30-year-old plane broke up into fragments and erupted into flames as it made contact with the ground, the Karelia branch of the emergencies ministry said in a statement on its website.

It was unclear why the plane was forced to attempt a landing on the highway but investigators pointed to a possible failure with the landing systems at Petrozavodsk, including high-intensity landing lights.

"The plane sustained a hard landing two kilometres from Petrozavodsk," the emergencies ministry said. "Forty-four people were killed and eight people injured."

Images published on the ministry's website showed wreckage strewn across the road and an inhabited area perilously close in the background. The plane, flying from Moscow's Domodedovo airport, carried 43 passengers and nine crew members.

"The scene is terrible. It's carnage. It was a miracle that fragments of the fuselage did not hit houses on the edge of the village of Besovets," a source in the aviation industry told the Interfax agency. "Corpses are strewn over the highway," the source added.

The head of the Karelia region, Andrei Nelidov, has travelled to the scene of the crash and will later hold an emergency meeting including prosecutors and the FSB Security Service.

Russia's Karelia region, which lies close to the border with Finland, is a picturesque area of lakes and forests hugely popular with Russian tourists for the summer holidays.

Picture taken 08 March 2007 shows a Tu-134 aircraft landing at Grozny airport in Chechnya. Forty-four people were killed and eight badly injured when a plane crashed onto a highway and burst into flames in northern Russia, narrowly missing an inhabited area, officials said on June 21, 2011. (AFP)

The spokeswoman of the emergencies ministry Irina Andrianova told the Interfax news agency that seven of the eight injured were "in an extremely serious condition" and all the casualties were receiving treatment for burns.

The lifenews.ru website said a child named as Anton Terekhin, 10, was among the survivors. The head of the emergencies ministry's regional operations, Shamstudin Dagirov, told Russian news agencies that a Swedish citizen was killed.

The head of the Petrozavodsk airport Alexei Kuzmitsky told Interfax that weather conditions around the airport at the time were "unfavourable" and Andrianova said there had been heavy fog and rain at the time of the crash.

A possible cause of the crash however could be the failure of ground-based systems to guide the plane in to landing, the deputy head of the inter-state air commission (MAK) which investigates air accidents in the ex-USSR, Alexei Morozov, told the ITAR-TASS news agency.

"The high-intensity landing lights on the runway that should be switched on in bad weather conditions were not working," he said. The plane's black boxes have been located.

RussAir officials told Russian news agencies that the plane, made in 1981, had been completely checked before take-off and there had been no technical issues with the aircraft.

"The main question is why the Tu-134 did not start its landing on the runway but on the motorway," a RussAir official told Interfax.

The spokesman of the Russian Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin told news agencies that a criminal probe was being opened into neglect of air transport rules.

Russia's aviation industry remains blighted by repeated accidents involving its ageing fleet of planes, with the Soviet-era Tupolev jets having a particularly poor safety record.

In April last year, a Tu-154 carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and other top officials came down in fog near the Russian city of Smolensk killing all 96 people on board.

Meanwhile, in September, a Tu-154 plane made a miraculous emergency landing on a derelict airstrip in Russia's remote Komi region after its electrical systems failed midflight.

<한글기사>

30년된 러시아 여객기 추락, 44명 사망

(모스크바 AP=연합뉴스) 러시아 북서부에서 20일(현지시각) 밤 여객기가 추락해 44명이 사망했다고 리아노보스티 통신 등 현지언론이 보도했다.

러시아 비상사태부는 이날 오후 11시 40분께 승객과 승무원 등 52명을 태운 러 스에어 여객기가 카렐리야주(州) 페트로자보츠크공항 활주로 인근 고속도로에 불시 착하면서 화염에 휩싸였다고 밝혔다.

생존자 8명은 병원으로 후송됐으나 위중한 상태여서 인명 피해가 늘어날 것으로 우려된다.

이 여객기는 러시아제 투폴레프-134기로 모스크바에서 출발해 페트로자보츠크공 항에 착륙을 시도하던 중 사고를 당했다.