Moscow - Forty-one people on board a
Russian Aeroflot passenger plane were killed on Sunday,
including two children, after the aircraft caught fire as it
made a bumpy emergency landing at a Moscow airport, Russian
investigators said.
Television footage showed the Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash
bouncing along the tarmac at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport
before the rear part of the plane suddenly burst into flames.
Many passengers on board SU 1492 then escaped via the
plane's emergency slides that inflated after the hard landing.
The plane, which had been flying from Moscow to the northern
Russian city of Murmansk, had been carrying 73 passengers and
five crew members, Russia's aviation watchdog said.
Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative
Committee, said in a statement that only 37 out of 78 people on
board had survived, meaning 41 people had lost their lives.
No official cause has been given for the disaster.
#Russia_Plane_Tragedy41 passengers died in the fiery landing by Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet100 passenger plane at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport.
— AdrianaStuijt (@AdrianaStuijt) May 6, 2019
The Investigative Committee said it had opened an
investigation and was looking into whether the pilots had
breached air safety rules.
Some passengers blamed bad weather and lightning.
"We took off and then lightning struck the plane," the
Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr
Egorov, as saying.
"The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were
so scared, we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped down
the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the
ground."
At least 40 people were killed when a #Russian #Airliner burst #Sukhoi SSJ100 operated by #National airline #Aeroflot into flames while making an emergency landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on Sunday evening. #RIP🙏🏻
@suratairportac1 tell the dead to rest in peace. pic.twitter.com/URn2peVeMt
— Active Citizen Sanjay Ezhava🇮🇳 (@sanjayezhava) May 6, 2019
State TV broadcast mobile phone footage shot by another
passenger in which people could be heard screaming.
President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
expressed their condolences and ordered investigators to
establish what had happened.
The Interfax news agency cited an unnamed "informed source"
as saying the evacuation of the plane had been delayed by some
passengers insisting on collecting their hand luggage first.
Russian news agencies reported that injured passengers were
being treated in hospitals.
The Flightradar24 tracking service showed that the plane had
circled twice over Moscow before making an emergency landing
after just under 30 minutes in the air.
The plane's under-carriage gave way on impact and its
engines caught fire.
Interfax cited a source as saying the plane had only
succeeded making an emergency landing on the second attempt and
that some of the aircraft's systems had then failed.
The emergency landing was so hard that debris had found its
way into the engines, sparking a fire that swiftly engulfed the
rear of the fuselage, the same source said.
Russian investigators said they were looking into various
versions.
Russian news agencies reported that the plane had been
produced in 2017 and had been serviced as recently as April this
year.
Aeroflot has long shaken off its troubled post-Soviet safety
record and now has one of the world's most modern fleets on
international routes where it relies on Boeing and Airbus
aircraft.
Russian officials are keen for Aeroflot to buy more Sukhoi
Superjets, a regional airliner, for domestic flights to support
the country's fledgling civil aircraft industry. The plane is
built in Russia's Far East.
A Sukhoi Superjet crashed in Indonesia in 2012, killing all
45 people on board in an accident blamed on human error.
The Superjet entered service in 2011 and was the first new
passenger jet developed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet
Union.
It has been hit, however, by sporadic concerns over safety
and reliability, including a December 2016 grounding after a
defect was discovered in an aircraft's tail section.
Russian officials said on Sunday it was premature to talk of
grounding the Sukhoi Superjet for now. The plane is
predominantly used by Russian airlines like Aeroflot, but is
also used by a few other foreign operators, including a low-cost
Mexican airline.
Dozens of flights at Sheremetyevo were delayed because of
the disaster.