Russian Passenger Plane Crashes In Ukraine
Posted August 22, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A Russian passenger plane carrying 170 people crashed in the Ukraine on Tuesday.
The wreckage was found near the city of Donetsk.
The Pulkovo Airlines Tupolev 154 plane had been travelling from the Black Sea resort of Anapa to St. Petersburg when it disappeared from radar screens at about 2:30pm local time during a severe thunderstorm, according to Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Yulia Stadnikova.
It had issued an SOS distress call only minutes beforehand. The airliner was carrying 160 passengers, 45 of them children. There were 10 crew members on board.
“Nobody survived,” confirms Mykhaylo Korsakov, a spokesman for the Ministry.
Rescuers worked at the crash site, located about 400 miles east of Kiev but there was little they could do except gather pieces of the smoking wreckage.
The plane “was falling down like a petal,” one witness recalled. “It was floating, it circled around, then it went down and then there immediately was an explosion … and smoke started rising.”
“The only known fact is that the weather was bad, there was a strong thunderstorm and poor visibility,” Ukrainian emergency official Leonid Kastorsky explains.
Officials are sure weather was the cause and they’ve completely ruled out terrorism.
It was the third significant plane crash in the area this year, occurring less than two months after an Airbus belonging to Russian carrier S7 skidded off a runway and burst into flames, killing 124.
On May 3, an Armenian passenger plane crashed into the Black Sea while trying to land in the Russian resort city of Sochi amid rough weather. That disaster killed 113 people.
The type of plane involved in the latest crash – a Tu-154 – is commonly used by Russian airlines for regional flights.
