Flight recorders recovered
Forty-one dead in Russia jet crash
RUSSIAN emergency workers have recovered 41 bodies and two flight recorders from the wreckage of a plane that caught fire during an emergency landing in Moscow, officials said yesterday as they sought to discover the cause of the disaster.
Transport Minister Yevgeny Dietrich gave the death toll and said six of the survivors had been hospitalised. The plane, an Aeroflot SSJ100, was carrying 78 people, including five crew members. Thirty-three passengers and four crew members had survived.
The plane caught fire on Sunday evening as it came down hard on the runway at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport after turning back from a flight destined for Murmansk. The landing occurred about half an hour after takeoff, indicating that the plane had little time to dump its fuel.
Videos showed desperate passengers hurrying down emergency slides deployed from the plane’s forward section as black smoke billowed.
One of the dead was flight attendant Maxim Moiseev, Dietrich said.
Russian news reports, citing unnamed sources, said Moiseev was in the back part of the plane, which was engulfed in flames and tried unsuccessfully to deploy an evacuation slide.
Russia’s main investigative body said both of the plane’s flight recorders, data and voice, have been recovered.
Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko was also quoted by Russian news agencies yesterday as saying that investigators were looking into three main possibilities behind the cause of the disaster – inexperienced pilots, equipment failure and bad weather.
Russia sees no reason to ground its domestically produced Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft, the country’s transport minister said yesterday. The crash-landing on Sunday is the latest serious setback for the plane, the first new passenger jet developed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and an airliner held up by Moscow as proof it can produce its own high quality civil passenger aircraft.
Investigators have started trying to piece together why the Aeroflot jet was forced to make an emergency landing and why that landing went so badly wrong.
Asked by reporters if the Sukhoi planes should now be grounded pending the outcome of the investigation, Ditrikh said: “There are no grounds for that.” The plane, built in Russia’s Far East in 2017, had been serviced as recently as last month. Aeroflot has long shaken off its troubled post-Soviet safety record and now has one of the world’s most modern fleets on international routes where it relies mostly on Boeing and Airbus aircraft.
However Aeroflot also owns at least 50 Superjets which it operates on both domestic and international routes.
The Superjet, which first entered service in 2011, has been hit by sporadic concerns over safety and reliability, including a December 2016 grounding after a defect was discovered in an aircraft’s tail section.
Interjet Airlines, a Mexican lowcost airline, said on Sunday it also operated five Superjets “under the highest safety standards.” It pledged to follow the Russian investigation into the disaster closely.
After Sunday’s accident in Moscow, an online petition was launched demanding that the Russian authorities ban the Superjet.