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.
Thirteen survivors were pulled from the wreckage and rushed to
hospital by helicopter but one later died. Television footage showed the
plane, which had broken in two, lying in a snowy field. Only the tail
and rear part of the fuselage were visible.
It was not immediately clear what caused the UTair airlines ATR 72 to
crash with 39 passengers and four crew on board, the latest air
disaster to blight Russia's safety record.
"There are no explanations yet," Yuri Alekhin, head of the regional
branch of the Emergencies Ministry, told Russian television from the
scene of the crash.
He said the "black box" flight recorder had been found and added:
"Contact was lost with the plane just over three minutes after
take-off."
UTair said on its website that the twin-engine, turbo-prop plane had
been trying to make an emergency landing when it came down 1.5 km (one
mile) from the airport in the western Siberian city of Tyumen en route
to Surgut, an oil town to the northeast.
At least five of the survivors were in critical condition, RIA news
agency quoted hospital officials as saying in Tyumen, some 1,720 km
(1,070 miles) east of Moscow.
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.
The crash was the deadliest air disaster in Russia since a Yak-42
plane slammed into a riverbank near the city of Yaroslavl after takeoff
on Sept. 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.
The International Air Transport Association said in December that
global airline safety rates had improved in 2011 but that in Russia and
the Commonwealth of Independent States, which groups former Soviet
republics, the rate had risen.
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.
Reuters
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الخميس أغسطس 09, 2012 12:17 am
