Russian Plane Crashes in Siberia
M O S C O W, July 4, 2001 -- A Russian airliner plunged into a wooded meadow inSiberia and burned up after unsuccessful attempts to land in thecity of Irkutsk today, killing all 145 people on board.
Aviation officials were examining the two black box flightrecorders from the Tu-154 jet, said Vasily Yurchuk, spokesman forthe Emergency Situations Ministry. Another spokesman said 143bodies or fragments of bodies had been found. Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, who flew to thesite, said the plane's three engines may have failed for unknownreasons, Russian television reports said.
"It is so hard to comprehend how it could happen ... based onan elementary knowledge of aerodynamics. It is a weird accident,"Shoigu told reporters on the meadow, which was littered withsmoking fuselage. He said the plane was at an altitude of 2,800feet when it suddenly made a 180-degree turn and crashed.
Searching for Signs of Explosives
Security officials did not rule out a terrorist act and weresearching for signs of explosives, the Interfax news agency said. The 15-year-old plane, belonging to the Vladivostokavia airline,crashed about 18 miles outside Irkutsk, which is about 2,600 mileseast of Moscow. The area lies between Irkutsk and enormous LakeBaikal. There were no reports of casualties on the ground. The plane was carrying 136 passengers and nine crew members,Yurchuk said. But officials said the number aboard could be higherbecause of Russian airlines' widespread practice of takingunticketed passengers. Vladimir Rabezhin, deputy manager of Vladivostokavia, said therewere 12 foreigners, probably from China, aboard the airplane,ITAR-Tass said. The passenger list was not to be made public untillater in the day.
Long, Sad Night
Relatives and friends of the passengers spent a harrowing,tearful night in the airports at Yekaterinburg and Vladivostok.When they heard the announcement of no survivors, most went home orflew to Irkutsk to identify bodies, with the promise of $414 ininsurance payments from the airline, Interfax said. The plane disappeared from radar screens at 2:10 a.m. localtime, bound from Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains toVladivostok, the major port on Russia's Pacific Coast. The plane tried twice to land in Irkutsk, where it was to refueland drop off some passengers, and crashed on the third attempt,Russian television stations reported. There were no immediatedetails on the problem that prevented the plane from landing. A Tu-154 jet crashed on takeoff from Irkutsk in 1994, killing124 people. The plane reportedly was overloaded. In 1997, an An-124cargo plane crashed into an Irkutsk apartment building, killing 65people.
Soviet Collapse Led to Safety Decline
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, civil aviationdeclined as hundreds of small airlines were spun off from theone-time monolithic Aeroflot. Russia and other former Soviet republics were plagued withcrashes as aircraft maintenance and supervision deteriorated. Butthere have been fewer crashes in recent years. Russian President Vladimir Putin was monitoring developments inthe crash from the Kremlin. He ordered an investigation, headed byDeputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who also led the investigationof last year's catastrophic sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk. The most recent major crash involving a Russian plane was inOctober 2000, when an Il-18 plane transporting Russian soldierscrashed in Georgia, killing 83 people.
3-Engine Jet Common in Eastern Europe, China
The three-engine Tu-154, first put into commercial service in1972, is the workhorse of Russia's domestic airlines and widelyused throughout the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as wellas in China. A Tu-154 belonging to China Southwest Airlines crashed in Chinain 1999, killing all 61 people aboard. A German-owned Tu-154collided with a U.S. Air Force C-141 off the coast of Namibia in1998, killing 33 people, and in 1997 a Tajik Tu-154 crashed enroute to the United Arab Emirates, killing 85.