The Russian plane that crashed in Moscow turned back and made an emergency landing due to technical reasons, the airline Aeroflot said. 41 people died in the crash.
According to Aeroflot, something with the plane's technology forced it to turn around, and the plane then caught fire during landing. According to the website Flightradar24, the plane did a loop in the air before the emergency landing.
”"After takeoff, the crew reported a deviation and decided to return to the airport. At 6:30 the aircraft made an emergency landing," Sheremetyevo Airport announced in a statement.
Several of the passengers testified that the plane was struck by lightning before it turned around and crashed.
”"The plane turned around and landed hard. We were so scared that we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped on the runway like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground," Pyotr Egorov, one of the survivors on board, told the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The pilot also tells reporters that the lightning knocked out the communication system and that is what caused the accident.
”We managed to restore communication through the emergency frequency on the radio. But the coverage only worked for a short time and was constantly broken,” the pilot told Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Crash investigators do not want to draw any conclusions about the cause of the crash until a proper investigation has been conducted, and they are looking at several different reasons why the plane crashed.
The plane was a regional aircraft with a capacity for 75 to 95 passengers of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 type. There are no plans to stop flights with the plane model, Russia's Emergencies Ministry said, according to the state-run Russian news agency Ria Novosti.
Sources told the Russian news agency Interfax that the evacuation of the plane was slowed by passengers trying to get their hand luggage on the way out of the burning plane.
The plane was en route to the northwestern city of Murmansk. 41 of the 78 people on board died in the crash, at least two of them children. Eleven were injured, three of them critically.
A three-day national mourning period has been declared in the region from Monday.
President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have expressed their condolences following the crash.
Source: TT
