OTTAWA — While chartered jets for NHL teams in North America are often luxurious aircraft that allow players to travel safely and comfortably, according to former KHL players, the planes used by teams across Russia are anything but.
Former Ottawa Senators player Jamie Rivers played for the CSKA Moscow in the Kontinental Hockey League four years ago. He said every trip he took aboard the team's plane during the five months he spent overseas left him "white knuckled."
"There were a lot of flights we went on where I put in the iPod and tried to go to sleep and just figured well if we go down, we go down, I don't want to know about it," he said.
While Rivers said he doesn't know what the Yakovlev Yak-42 jet was like that crashed Wednesday killing at least 43 people — many of them members of Russia's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team — the planes he flew on while in Russia were often old cargo planes that had been modified to accommodate passengers.
"Every seat that was bolted into the floor had a different distance from the seat in front of it, so some rows were kind of normal and some rows you had to sit sideways because your knees were banging into the chair in front of you," he said.
Rivers said at times when the plane was experiencing turbulence overhead shelving would fall off and parts inside the plane would rattle.
"It really seemed like every takeoff and landing was a coin toss, really," he said.
The safety of air travel in Russia has been a hot-button issue in recent years.
A 2006 safety report from the International Air Transport Association found that Russia and members of the Commonwealth of Independent States had an accident rate 13 times higher than the global average. Statistics compiled by the Aviation Safety Network identify Russia as the second-worst geographical region for fatal airplane crashes, behind the United States.
While IATA safety reports in 2009 and 2010 show Russia and the CIS's accident rate fell well below the global average, they haven't yet calculated statistics for 2011.
The plane that crashed Wednesday was chartered by the Lokomotiv hockey team and was en route to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, when it crashed two kilometres past the runway at the Yaroslavl Airport.
The plane was operated by Yak Service, a charter airline founded in 1993.
In June last year, Russian authorities restricted the carrier's operations for nearly three months after finding deficiencies. The operating restrictions were removed in August 2010, but the European Union said in November that it was not satisfied that Yak Service's fleet was entirely fitted with mandatory equipment necessary for international commercial air transport, and as a result banned two of the company's Yak-40 trijets from flying in European Union airspace.
An investigation is under way to determine what caused the Yak-42 plane crash Wednesday, something that Rivers said he hopes will prompt the KHL to look at its travel policy.
But he's doubtful the accident will lead to any major changes since many hockey teams don't have room in their budgets for expensive travel.
"It's tough. They have NHL payrolls on some of these teams, but they certainly don't have NHL revenue to support it. When that happens, there's costs that have to get cut somewhere. So, we'll see," he said.
Source: http://www.ottawacitizen.com
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