Dozens of passengers survive after plane crashes into building
● Twelve people killed as Kazakh jet comes down just after take-off
A plane with 98 people aboard has crashed into a building shortly after take-off in Kazakhstan, killing at least 12 people.
At least 54 people are in hospital with injuries, including ten in critical condition.
The injured included children.
One survivor said the plane started shaking less than two minutes after take-off yesterday.
“At first the left wing jolted really hard, then the right. The plane continued to gain altitude, shaking quite severely, and then went down,” said passenger Aslan Nazaraliyev.
Government officials said the plane had been de-iced before the flight, but Mr Nazaraliyev said that the wings of the plane were covered in ice and passengers who used emergency exits over the wings were slipping and falling down.
The cause of the crash in the central Asian nation was unclear, but authorities were looking at whether pilot error or technical failure were a factor, Kazakhstan’s deputy prime minister Roman Sklyar said.
The Bek Air aircraft hit a concrete fence and a two-storey building after take-off from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city and former capital.
It lost attitude at 7:22am, Almaty International Airport said.
Mr Sklyar said the plane’s tail hit the runway twice during take-off, indicating that it struggled to take off.
Passengers who survived may have been saved by the fact that the plane crashed at a lower speed and from a lower altitude because it was taking off, and it came down in terrain that may have eased the impact.
“The lower the speed, the lower the energy, and the fact that it lands on things that might not tear it up so much” all play a role, said Adrian Young, an aviation consultant at the To70 consultancy in the Netherlands.
Cold weather may have helped prevent fire, Mr Young said.
The plane was flying to Nursultan, the capital formerly known as Astana.
Local authorities had earlier put the death toll at 15, but the interior ministry later revised the figure downward.
Officials in the Almaty branch of the Kazakh health ministry could not explain why the figure had been revised, but attributed the coning fusion to the “agitation” at the site of the crash.
The airport said there was no fire and a rescue operation got under way immediately.
Around 1,000 people were working at the snow-covered site of the crash.
The weather in Almaty was fair and temperatures just below freezing, although some witnesses reported fog in the area at the time the plane was taking off.
Video footage showed the front of the broken-up fuselage rammed against a buildand the rear of the plane lying in the field next to the airport.
In Almaty, dozens of people lined up in front of a blood bank to donate blood for the injured.
The aircraft was identified as a Fokker-100, a medium-sized, twin-turbofan jet airliner. It was reported to be 23 years old and was most recently certified to operate in May.
The company manufacturing the aircraft went bankrupt in 1996 and the production of the Fokker-100 stopped the following year.
Kazakh President Kassymjomart Tokayev ordered an inspection of all airlines and aviation infrastructure in the country.
There are currently 18 passenger airlines and four cargo carriers registered in Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan’s air safety record is far from spotless. In 2009, all Kazakh airlines – with the exception of the flagship carrier Air Astana – were banned from operating in the European Union because they failed to meet safety standards.