A Russian airliner carrying 170 people crashed in flames on Tuesday in eastern Ukraine, probably after hitting turbulence, killing all on board, officials said.
”There are witnesses who said the plane was intact as it fell so the most likely explanation is that it flew into a thunderstorm,” Irina Andrianova, a spokesperson for the Russian Federation’s emergencies ministry, told First Channel television.
The ministry said there were no survivors. Vasily Nalyotenko, deputy head of Pulkovo Airlines, which operated the Soviet-designed Tu-154, said 170 people were on board, including 10 crew and 39 children.
Ukrainian officials said helicopters circling the crash site about 45km north of the regional town of Donetsk saw the plane in flames. Bad weather in the area was still hampering rescue efforts.
Flight 612 took off from the Black Sea resort of Anapa and was bound for its home base of St Petersburg. Its route went across Ukraine’s eastern tip.
”The aircraft issued an SOS at 3..37pm [Moscow time]. At 3.39pm, it disappeared from radar screens,” Russia’s emergencies ministry said.
The Russian transport ministry said the crew reported severe turbulence in a distress message sent from 11 000m before disappearing. It said the plane came down near a village north of Donetsk.
A spokesperson for the Ukrainian emergencies ministry told Fifth Channel television in Kiev that a fire may have broken out in the plane, but Russian officials disputed this.
The Tu-154, dating from Soviet times, is the workhorse of most airlines operating in ex-Soviet states.
Airlines operating in former Soviet republics initially had a patchy safety record in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, but this has improved in recent years.
Crashes in July
On July 10 this year, a plane carrying the chief of staff of the Russian navy and other officers caught fire after crash-landing at Simferopol airfield in Crimea, Ukraine. It was the fourth serious aviation incident involving Russian passenger planes in 36 hours, one of which killed more than 130 people.
The others included two emergency landings — one also at Simferopol and the other in the Russian Siberian city of Irkutsk — and a major airliner crash at Irkutsk.
No fatalities were immediately reported in the Crimea accident in Ukraine and the Russian navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Vladimir Masorin, was unhurt. Several officers with him received burns of varying degrees in the accident
The navy said one possible cause of the crash was a bird being sucked into one of the two engines of the Tupolev 134 as it took off from Simferopol, causing it to stop.
Earlier in the day, a Tu-154 with 130 passengers and nine crew members requested to make an emergency landing at Irkutsk airport just 20 minutes after taking off from there, after detecting a problem with one of the three engines, news agencies reported.
Also on July 10, a Russia-operated Airbus A310 on a flight between Antalya in Turkey and Moscow made an emergency landing in Simferopol after the crew detected a drop in oil pressure in one of the two engines, Russian news agencies reported.
About 130 people died on July 9 when another Airbus A310 crashed on landing at Irkutsk airport after failing to slow down, careening off the end of the runway into a building and bursting into flames. — Reuters, AFP