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PERM, Russia — A Russian passenger plane that caught fire as it fell from the sky on Sunday likely suffered engine failure before it crashed, killing all 88 people on board, investigators said.
The right engine of the Boeing 737-500 caught fire as it prepared to land in Perm, an industrial centre with a population of about one million some 1,200 kilometres east of Moscow.
The plane came down on the outskirts of the city, hitting the ground just a few hundred metres from small wooden houses and apartment buildings. Officials said no one on the ground was killed.
Flight 821, operated by an Aeroflot subsidiary, carried 82 passengers, including six children under 10, and six crew members, Aeroflot said.
Firefighters and investigators work at the site where a Russian airliner crashed on a railway track outside the Ural city of Perm Sunday. The Russian Boeing 737-500 airliner crashed near the Ural mountains on Sunday, killing all 88 passengers and crew on board including 21 foreign nationals. (REUTERS/Evgeny Malychev)
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Passengers, crew perish in plane crash
A passenger jet travelling from Moscow crashed as it was preparing to land in central Russia, killing all 88 people aboard.
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Aeroflot officials said the plane was circling at about 1,100 metres in “difficult weather conditions” – including low cloud cover and rain – when it lost contact with ground dispatchers.
Witnesses to the 3:15 a.m. crash said the plane was on fire as it fell.
“I felt an explosion, it threw me off the bed,” a woman in Perm, who was not identified, told Vesti-24 television. “My neighbours, other witnesses, told me that it was burning in the air, it looked like a comet. It hit the ground opposite the next house, trailing like fireworks in the sky.”
The most likely cause was engine failure, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the federal prosecutors' Investigative Committee, said in televised comments.
The head of the Investigative Committee said examination of the site showed the crash “apparently was connected to technical failure and a fire in the right engine,” the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
“There is much evidence for this,” Alexander Bastrykin was quoted as saying.
Citizens of Azerbaijan, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the U.S. were among those killed, the airline said. The U.S. Embassy said the man listed as an American is not a U.S. citizen and no Americans appeared to have been on the flight.
Among those killed was Gennady Troshev, 61, an army general who commanded troops in Chechnya. Human rights activists had accused him of tolerating rampant abuses in the war-ravaged republic.
Mr. Troshev, who was dismissed in 2002 during a power struggle within Russia's armed forces, was travelling to Perm to attend a wrestling competition, news agencies said.
The plane's flight recorders have been found, and officials said it will take three to four weeks to analyze them.
The passenger jet fell on a railway embankment, damaging a section of the track. Parts of the plane's fuselage reading “Aeroflot” and “Boeing” lay askew on the rails, along with clothing, life preservers and engine parts.
Emergency workers in camouflage uniforms picked up human remains and placed them in blue bags. Relatives of passengers said they were asked to provide DNA samples to help in the identification.
Part of the Trans-Siberian railway was shut down temporarily as a result of the rail damage, but traffic was restored later in the day, the national railway company said.
Pavel Shevchenko, a 36-year-old Perm resident who lives just 300 metres from the crash site, said he was awoken by an explosion and ran outside. He said a neighbour who saw the crash told him the plane hit the ground at a 30- or 40-degree angle.
Mr. Shevchenko said he feared his acquaintances or friends could be among the dead.
“It's awful. There's just no words to describe it. Perm is a small town, everybody knows everybody else here,” he told The Associated Press.
There was also some relief that the plane had not hit any homes when it crashed.
“I think the pilots did everything to save the city,” Tatyana Sokolova, a Perm resident, said through tears on Vesti-24 television.
Russia and the other former Soviet republics have some of the world's worst air traffic safety records, according to the International Air Transport Association. Experts blame weak government regulation, poor pilot training and a cost-cutting by many carriers.
No problems were reported with the 15-year-old jet when it was last inspected at the beginning of 2008, Aeroflot deputy director Lev Koshlyakov said.
Sunday's crash was the second involving a Boeing 737 in the former Soviet Union in the past month. A Boeing flying from the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan to Iran crashed shortly after takeoff Aug. 24, killing 64 of the 90 people on board.
The pilot of that plane has been detained by prosecutors, officials said this week.
