50 die as Boeing 737 bursts into flames on landing
Print Edition
A BOEING 737 belonging to a domestic Russian airline crashed yesterday while attempting to land at an airport in western Tatarstan, killing all 50 people on board, Russia’s emergency situations ministry said.
“According to preliminary information, all the people on board the flight, 44 passengers and six crew members, were killed,” a ministry spokeswoman said. “There were no children among the passengers.”
The local branch of the ministry said in an earlier statement that the jet, arriving from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, crashed on landing in the Volga city of Kazan at 7:25pm.
The Tatarstan Airlines plane “hit the runway and burst into flames,” Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The flight was making a second attempt to land and exploded when it hit the runway.
Firefighters extinguished a fire at the scene. According to eyewitness reports, the Boeing lost altitude quickly and its fuel tank exploded on impact.
There were no immediate indications of what may have caused the crash. According to local reports, there were high winds and cloudy skies over the airport in central Russia. Temperatures were above zero.
Russia has seen a string of deadly crashes in recent years. Some have been blamed on the use of aging aircraft, but industry experts point to a number of other problems, including poor crew training, crumbling airports, lax government controls and widespread neglect of safety in the pursuit of profits.
The last fatal airliner crash was in December, when a Russian-made Tupolev belonging to the Red Wings airline careered off the runway at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport, rolled across a snowy field and slammed into the slope of a nearby highway, breaking into pieces and catching fire. Equipment failure was blamed for the crash, which killed five people.
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