White Culture

[webfact]

Forty-one reported killed after Russian passenger plane crash-lands in Moscow

By Maria Tsvetkova and Andrew Osborn

 

A passenger plane is seen on fire after an emergency landing at the Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow, Russia May 5, 2019. REUTERS/Nadezhda Polomoshnova

 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Forty-one people on board a Russian Aeroflot passenger plane were killed on Sunday, including two children, after the aircraft caught fire as it made a bumpy emergency landing at a Moscow airport, Russian investigators said.

 

Television footage showed the Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash bouncing along the tarmac at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport before the rear part of the plane suddenly burst into flames.

 

Many passengers on board SU 1492 then escaped via the plane's emergency slides that inflated after the hard landing.

 

The plane, which had been flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of Murmansk, had been carrying 73 passengers and five crew members, Russia's aviation watchdog said.

 

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative Committee, said in a statement that only 37 out of 78 people on board had survived, meaning 41 people had lost their lives.

 

No official cause has been given for the disaster.

 

The Investigative Committee said it had opened an investigation and was looking into whether the pilots had breached air safety rules.

Some passengers blamed bad weather and lightning.

 

"We took off and then lightning struck the plane," the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr Egorov, as saying.

 

"The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were so scared, we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped down the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground."

 

State TV broadcast mobile phone footage shot by another passenger in which people could be heard screaming.

 

President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed their condolences and ordered investigators to establish what had happened.

The Interfax news agency cited an unnamed "informed source" as saying the evacuation of the plane had been delayed by some passengers insisting on collecting their hand luggage first.

 

Russian news agencies reported that injured passengers were being treated in hospitals.

 

DEBRIS IN THE ENGINES

The Flightradar24 tracking service showed that the plane had circled twice over Moscow before making an emergency landing after just under 30 minutes in the air.

 

The plane's under-carriage gave way on impact and its engines caught fire.

 

Interfax cited a source as saying the plane had only succeeded making an emergency landing on the second attempt and that some of the aircraft's systems had then failed.

 

The emergency landing was so hard that debris had found its way into the engines, sparking a fire that swiftly engulfed the rear of the fuselage, the same source said.

 

Russian investigators said they were looking into various versions.

 

Russian news agencies reported that the plane had been produced in 2017 and had been serviced as recently as April this year.

 

Aeroflot has long shaken off its troubled post-Soviet safety record and now has one of the world's most modern fleets on international routes where it relies on Boeing and Airbus aircraft.

 

Russian officials are keen for Aeroflot to buy more Sukhoi Superjets, a regional airliner, for domestic flights to support the country's fledgling civil aircraft industry. The plane is built inRussia's Far East.

 

A Sukhoi Superjet crashed in Indonesia in 2012, killing all 45 people on board in an accident blamed on human error.

 

The Superjet entered service in 2011 and was the first new passenger jet developed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

It has been hit, however, by sporadic concerns over safety and reliability, including a December 2016 grounding after a defect was discovered in an aircraft's tail section.

Russian officials said on Sunday it was premature to talk of grounding the Sukhoi Superjet for now. The plane is predominantly used by Russian airlines like Aeroflot, but is also used by a few other foreign operators, including a low-cost Mexican airline.

 

Dozens of flights at Sheremetyevo were delayed because of the disaster.

 

(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova and Andrew Osborn; Additional reporting by Gleb Stolyarov in Moscow and Tim Hepher in Paris; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Frances Kerry and Peter Cooney)

 

-- © Copyright Reuters 2019-05-06

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[Tug]

God that’s horrifying

[Basil B]

1 hour ago, webfact said:

he emergency landing was so hard that debris had found its way into the engines, sparking a fire that swiftly engulfed the rear of the fuselage, the same source said.

There was a trail of fire for a long distance behind that I suspect it had ruptured fuel tanks on landing.

[Srikcir]

3 hours ago, webfact said:

The emergency landing was so hard that debris had found its way into the engines, sparking a fire that swiftly engulfed the rear of the fuselage

So a question as to whether that was pilot error, equipment malfunction or both.

The emergency landing consisted of two groundings (it bounced up from the runway from the first runway strike then back to the runway). It was the first runway strike that blew the engines and likely ruptured wing fuel tanks. The main cabin exit was over the wings.

 

Western airlines have, for a long time been sceptical of the safety of Russian-built aircraft, and ongoing issues with the Superjet isn’t helping sell the aircraft. Aside from Cityjet, there is not a single European airline operator of the airline. In The Americas, the Superjet’s last days at Mexican carrier Interjet (first airline operator outside Russia) are being planned.

https://aviationanalyst.co.uk/2018/11/04/the-airlines-ditching-unreliable-russian-sukhoi-superjets/

[justin case]

if you are going to crash land, should you not first dump all the fuel to avoid bursts in flame?

[KhunBENQ]

The pilots survived. So a good chance to find out what happened.

 

Edited May 6, 2019 by KhunBENQ

[Peterw42]

There is some really disturbing details/footage emerging, showing people evacuating at the front (only exit) of the plane with all there luggage, at the expense of those perishing in the rear. Literally people who have stopped to get there bag, laptop, umbrella etc, holding up the evacuation.

Edited May 6, 2019 by Peterw42

[Vacuum]

5 hours ago, webfact said:

the evacuation of the plane had been delayed by some passengers insisting on collecting their hand luggage first.

Morons!

[Peterw42]

This is being misreported as a mid air fire but Footage at 4:58 shows the actual hard landing starting the fire.

 

 

 

[Peterw42]

This one shows some of the moronic passengers who stopped to get there luggage slowing the evacuation so the people in the rear perished.

 

https://www.euronews.com/2019/05/05/several-injured-after-russian-passenger-jet-makes-emergency-landing-news-agencies-say

[balo]

Well tragic , but probably would not have happened with an Airbus, or Boeing , not like this .

Russia can keep their planes for themselves.  

[Basil B]

10 hours ago, Srikcir said:

So a question as to whether that was pilot error, equipment malfunction or both.

The emergency landing consisted of two groundings (it bounced up from the runway from the first runway strike then back to the runway). It was the first runway strike that blew the engines and likely ruptured wing fuel tanks. The main cabin exit was over the wings.

 

Western airlines have, for a long time been sceptical of the safety of Russian-built aircraft, and ongoing issues with the Superjet isn’t helping sell the aircraft. Aside from Cityjet, there is not a single European airline operator of the airline. In The Americas, the Superjet’s last days at Mexican carrier Interjet (first airline operator outside Russia) are being planned.

https://aviationanalyst.co.uk/2018/11/04/the-airlines-ditching-unreliable-russian-sukhoi-superjets/

Looking at a plot it looks like the pilots aborted a landing when intercepting the glideslope, opting to turn back to take a longer straight in approach, could that be because the flaps would not deploy?

The main cabin exits were not over the wing, there were two emergency over wing windows, two doors to the rear and two at the front, there were 3 cabin crew I assume one at the back (who I assume was the one that perished) and two at the front and I assume the passengers sitting by the overwing windows had been instructed on how to open them in an emergency, but looking at various youtube clips it would not have been wise to try to use them.    

  

10 hours ago, justin case said:

if you are going to crash land, should you not first dump all the fuel to avoid bursts in flame?

It has been reported that because they were flying over Moscow and could not communicate with ATC they did not dump fuel, but to be fair they would have still landed with some fuel in the tanks, the purpose of dumping fuel is to reduce weight thereby not landing overweight.

 

2 hours ago, balo said:

Well tragic , but probably would not have happened with an Airbus, or Boeing , not like this .

Russia can keep their planes for themselves.  

Let's wait for the official report, it has been reported the plane was hit by lightning, I was on a plane hit by lightning, no big deal landed safely. the guy sitting next to me said he worked for the company that makes the seals for the fuel tanks and they predict every plane gets hit by lightning at least once in its lifetime. 

 

More details here: http://avherald.com/h?article=4c78f3e6&opt=0

Edited May 6, 2019 by Basil B

[LongTang]

16 hours ago, Peterw42 said:

There is some really disturbing details/footage emerging, showing people evacuating at the front (only exit) of the plane with all there luggage, at the expense of those perishing in the rear. Literally people who have stopped to get there bag, laptop, umbrella etc, holding up the evacuation.

 

Absolutely !!! i was just about to post the same thing.

I was shocked to see so many people leaving the plane with their bags, There is even a video taken from the inside where You can hear people opening the upper baggage compartments while the others are screaming, human nature for you..

 

I hope all pre-flight safety movies will include a section where it explicitly warn people that taking your bags during an emergency evacuation is a criminal offense.