Wreckage found after plane goes missing with 28 on board in Russia

Wreckage from a plane carrying 28 people that went missing has been found a few miles fromtheairportinrussia'sfar East where it was supposed to land, officials said, and everyone aboard is feared dead.

The Antonov An-26 plane was on approach for a landing in bad weather when it missed a scheduled communication and disappeared from radar as it neared the airport in the town of Palana, officials in the Kamchatka region said.

Officials said 22 passengers, including one child, were on board, as well as six crew members. Most of the passengers were residents of Palana, a town which is home to about 2,900 people and near the Sea of Okhotsk.

Officials said that communication with the plane had been lost 5.5 miles from Palana airport, ten minutes before it was scheduled to land.

Unconfirmed reports say it hit a rock as it was coming in to land. It is thought that it then crashed on the coast.

Russia's state aviation agency, Rosaviatsiya, said that parts of the plane were found about three miles from the airport's runway. Part of the fuselage was found on the side of a mountain, Russia’s Pacific Fleet told news agencies, and another part was floating in the Okhotsk Sea.

Sergei Gorb, deputy director of Kamchatka Aviation Enterprise, said the plane "practically crashed into a sea cliff " which was not supposed to be in its landing trajectory.

The aircraft has been in operation since 1982, Russian state news agency Tass reported.

The director of Kamchatka Aviation Enterprise, Alexei Khabarov, told the Interfax news agency that the plane was technically sound before taking off from the city of Petropavlovsk-kamchatsky.

According to Russian media reports, none of the six crew members or 22 passengers on board survived. The head of the local government in Palana, Olga Mokhireva, was among them, the Kamchatka government said.

No bodies have been found yet and there was no official confirmation of the reports.

A criminal investigation has been opened, as is routine.

A search and rescue mission is under way in the area, but the work is hindered by a complex mountain terrain.

In 2012, an Antonov An-28 plane belonging to Kamchatka Aviation Enterprise crashed into a mountain while flying the same route as Tuesday's flight.

A total of 14 people were on board and tenof them were killed. Both pilots, who were among the dead, were found to have alcohol in their blood, Tass reported.

Russia once had a poor flight safety record but this has improved in recent years.

Still, there have been several major accidents in recent years. In May 2019 an Aeroflot Sukhoi superjet crashed and caught fire on a Moscow runway killing 41 people.

Just over a year earlier, a Saratov airlines jet went down minutes after take-off from Moscow. All 71 people on board died.