71 killed in crash of Russian passenger jet
Domestic flight had mostly regional residents on board.
The plane went down Sunday near Moscow, killing everyone aboard shortly after takeoff from one of the city’s airports.
A Russian plane MOSCOW — carrying 71 people crashed near Moscow shortly after takeoff Sunday afternoon, killing all on board.
Flight 703, operated by the Russian regional carrier Saratov Airlines, was carrying 65 passengers and six crew members. The plane went down near the village of Stepanovskoye, about 50 miles southeast of Moscow in the Ramenskoye district, according to a statement from the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry.
There were no survivors, Moscow’s regional transportation prosecutor-general confirmed. The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.
The Russian aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, said the flight departed at 2:21 p.m. from Domodedovo Airport. The Antonov AN-148, a small regional jet, was headed to the city of Orsk in the Orenburg region, about 1,000 miles southeast of Moscow, near the border with Kazakhstan.
“Several minutes after takeoff, radio connection with the crew disappeared, the plane’s mark disappeared from radars,” the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
FlightRadar24, an online site that tracks real-time flight information, shows the plane losing altitude just six minutes after takeoff. It reached 6,400 feet before dropping to 5,800 feet, rising again briefly and falling sharply — all within one minute.
Most passengers on board were residents of the region, the Interfax news agency quoted an Orenburg official as saying.
A spokeswoman for the Orsk city administration, Yelena Abramova, told Interfax that one of the passengers was a Swiss citizen.
Fragments of the plane and many bodies were discovered near Stepanovskoye, the official news agency Tass reported, citing a spokesman for the Emergency Services ministry.
The ministry added that “rescue workers, ambulances and firefighters” were headed to the site of the crash, an open field.
“The snow is deep; we need heavy-duty equipment,” Andrei Kulakov, head of the Ramenskoye district said in an interview broadcast by the news channel Rossiya 24.
President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences and ordered his Cabinet to create a commission to investigate the crash, according to a statement on the Kremlin website.
Footage from the Orsk airport showed Russians pacing and wailing as news of the crash spread.
A government watchdog agency cited Saratov Airlines, a regional carrier, for safety concerns in December, but its report focused on the storage of flammable materials on the ground, not on its airplanes.
Both the federal transportation agency and the prosecutor’s office in the carrier’s home region opened investigations into the cause of the crash Sunday.
Outdated equipment and a lack of government oversight plagued Russian aviation for years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and there were frequent crashes. But in recent years, the industry’s safety record has improved markedly as major airlines have invested in fleets of Western airplanes.
The most recent devastating crash occurred on Dec. 25, 2016, when a Tupulov TU-154 operated by the Ministry of Defense plunged into the Black Sea moments after taking off from the southern resort of Sochi. All 92 people on board died.
In March 2016, all 62 people on board a FlyDubai 737 died when it crashed on landing at Rostov-on-Don.
In October 2015, a Russian charter flight ferrying 224 passengers and crew members to St. Petersburg from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, crashed soon after taking off, killing everyone on board.
After months of cautious silence, Egypt acknowledged that terrorists had most likely brought down the plane.