Thirty one people are known dead after a Russian ATR-72 airliner with 43 passengers and crew on board crashed to the ground within minutes of take-off from the airport of Tyumen in Western Siberia. The most serious of the injured are to be flown to Moscow. The Tyumen region has already declared a three-day mourning for the victims of this morning’s air crash.Investigators rule out a terror attack and blame a mechanical fault. Eyewitnesses say they saw a smoking engine.
~
Emergencies Ministry Press Service via Reuters
Emergency service workers investigate the wreckage of the UTair airlines ATR 72 passenger plane that crashed near the Siberian city of Tyumen April 2, 2012. A Russian passenger plane crashed and burst into flames after takeoff in an oil-producing region of Siberia on Monday, killing at least 31 of the 43 people on board, emergency officials said.
Emergency service workers investigate the wreckage of the UTair airlines ATR 72 passenger plane that crashed near the Siberian city of Tyumen April 2, 2012. A Russian passenger plane crashed and burst into flames after takeoff in an oil-producing region of Siberia on Monday, killing at least 31 of the 43 people on board, emergency officials said.
Emergencies Ministry Press Service via Reuters
Emergency service workers investigate the wreckage of the UTair airlines ATR 72 passenger plane that crashed near the Siberian city of Tyumen April 2, 2012
Emergency service workers investigate the wreckage of the UTair airlines ATR 72 passenger plane that crashed near the Siberian city of Tyumen April 2, 2012
Emergencies Ministry Press Service via Reuters
Emergency service workers stand near the tail section of the UTair airlines ATR 72 passenger plane that crashed near the Siberian city of Tyumen April 2, 2012.
It reminds me of another plane crash in Kyrgyzstan in which everyone survived, though the plane flipped and caught on fire.
Updated at 3:07 a.m. ET: MOSCOW -- Thirty-two people were killed but 11 were rescued alive from a plane crash in Siberia, Russia, an official reportedly said Monday.
The ATR 72, a twin-engine, turbo-prop plane, with 43 people aboard, crashed some 18 to 22 miles from the western Siberian city of Tyumen, Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova said.
The mid-range plane belonging to Russian airline UTair crashed after taking off from Tyumen on a flight to Surgut, an oil town further north in Siberia.There were 39 passengers and four crew on board, according to preliminary information, Andrianova said.
"Eleven people were injured and 32 killed," the Tyumen emergencies ministry said in a statement, according to the AFP news agency.
In a statement, UTair, a private Russian company, said the flight plane crashed "while conducting a forced landing" about a mile from another airport, Roschino, according to AFP.
Cabin on fire
The news agency said the plane's cabin was on fire when rescuers arrrived. The cause of the crash was not immediately known, Russian news agencies reported.
Injured survivors were flown to hospital by helicopter. At least five survivors were in critical condition, state-run RIA news agency reported, citing hospital officials in Tyumen, some 1,070 miles east of Moscow.
UTair has three ATR-72 craft made by the French-Italian manufacturer ATR, according to the airline's website.
Russian news agency RIA Novosti published what it said were images of the crash scene.
ATR is an equal partnership between two major European aeronautics players, Alenia Aermacchi, a Finmeccanica company, and EADS.
The crash was the deadliest air disaster in Russia since a Yak-42 plane crashed into a riverbank near the city of Yaroslavl after takeoff on September 7, 2011, killing 44 people and wiping out the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team.
President Dmitry Medvedev called for a reduction in the number of Russian airlines and improvements in crew training after that crash, which followed a June crash that killed 47 people including a navigator who had been drinking.
Russian plane crash kills 31, exposes safety record
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A passenger plane crashed and burst into flames after takeoff in Siberia on Monday, killing 31 people and putting the spotlight on Russia's poor air-safety record before Vladimir Putin's return as president.
Thirteen survivors were pulled from the wreckage but one later died after being rushed by helicopter to hospital in the city of Tyumen, some 1,720 km (1,070 miles) east of Moscow, emergency officials said.MOSCOW (Reuters) - A passenger plane crashed and burst into flames after takeoff in Siberia on Monday, killing 31 people and putting the spotlight on Russia's poor air-safety record before Vladimir Putin's return as president.
Television footage showed the UTair airlines ATR 72, which had snapped in two, lying in a snowy field with only the tail and rear visible. Emergency workers sifted through the wreckage and cleared away the snow.
An investigative committee said the most likely cause of the crash was a technical malfunction as the 21-year-old twin-engine, turbo-prop plane carried its four crew and 39 passengers on a flight to the oil town of Surgut.
"I went out on to my porch and heard a bang, saw a small flash and smoke came out. It turned, with smoke coming out, started to lose height and came down in the field. If it had turned a bit further, it would have hit us," a local resident, identified only as Alexei, told RIA news agency.
He said he often saw aircraft fly past, and the plane appeared not to be on the usual flight path: "It should have been behind my house but it was in front of it."
The investigative committee said the plane had notched up 35,000 flying hours since going into operation in 1992 and had not had a "serious" technical check since 2010.
Yuri Alekhin, head of the regional branch of the Emergencies Ministry, told Russian television at the scene of the crash that the "black box" flight recorder had been found and contact had been lost with the plane just over three minutes after take-off.
Surgutneftegas, Russia's fourth-largest oil company, said in a statement that it had lost some employees in the crash but did not say how many and did not name them.
RUSSIA'S POOR SAFETY RECORD
The crash was the worst in Russia since a passenger plane slammed into a riverbank near the city of Yaroslavl after takeoff on September 7, 2011, killing 44 people and wiping out the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice hockey team.
President Dmitry Medvedev and Putin, who is prime minister until he takes over as president on May 7, called for moves to improve Russia's air safety after that crash, including better training and improved conditions on board.
But their opponents on Monday drew attention to the lack of action since then and the fact that Transport Minister Igor Levitan remains in office.
"It's typical that 'the minister of catastrophes' does not receive even a cosmetic reprimand for all the chaos on public transport. They cover for each other," opposition ecologist Yevgenia Chirikova said in a message on her Twitter account.
Putin said last September that airlines should put passengers' safety above commercial considerations and ordered the government to draft proposals for improving condition on planes and at airports, but ignored calls to dismiss Levitan.
Putin, 59, has seen off the biggest opposition protests since he rose to power 12 years ago but faces increasing criticism and is under pressure to do more to tackle chronic problems such as corruption and Russia's poor safety record.
Russia and the former Soviet republics combined for one of the world's worst air-traffic safety records last year, with a total accident rate almost three times the world average, according to the International Air Transport Association.
IATA said in December that global airline safety rates had improved in 2011 but that the rate had risen in Russia and the CIS group of former Soviet republics.
Gunther Matschnigg, IATA senior vice-president for safety, said a key problem in Russia was that pilots and ground technicians were having to adapt to a growing number of a highly sophisticated aircraft.
He said Russian aviation officials and political leaders had accepted that pilot training needed rapid improvement.
UTair has three ATR-72 craft made by the French-Italian manufacturer ATR, according to the Russian airline's website www.utair.ru.
ATR is an equal partnership between two major European aeronautics players, Alenia Aermacchi, a Finmeccanica company, and EADS.
No comments:
Post a Comment