Moscow: Forty one people including at least two children are believed to have died when a Russian passenger plane made an emergency landing and was engulfed in flames at the Sheremetyevo International Airport here, Sunday, investigators said Monday.
Dramatic footage shared on social media showed Aeroflot’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft, land at the airport, in flames and black smoke pouring from its fuselage.
Passengers could be seen leaping onto an inflatable slide at the front and running from the blazing plane as huge black columns of smoke billowed into the sky.
“There were 78 people including crew members on board the plane,” the investigative committee said in a statement. “According to the updated info which the investigation has as of now, 37 people survived the disaster,” the statement added.
Dmitry Matveyev, the Moscow region’s health minister said earlier Monday that 11 people were injured in the mishap. Three of the injured were hospitalised, but were stable.
Investigators said they were looking into various lines of inquiry and it was premature to draw any conclusions about the cause of the accident. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has also ordered a special committee to investigate the disaster.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had offered his condolences to the victims’ loved ones, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The jet carrying 73 passengers and five crew members had just left Sheremetyevo when the crew issued a distress signal, officials said. “Flight Su-1492 took off on schedule at 6:02pm (15H02 GMT),” said a statement from the airport.
“After the take-off, the crew reported an anomaly and decided to come back to the departure airport. At 6:30 pm, the aircraft made an emergency landing,” it added.
The tabloid newspaper ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’ quoted one passenger, Petr Egorov, who said: “We had just taken off and the aircraft was hit by lightning…. The landing was rough, I almost passed out from fear.”
“It attempted an emergency landing but did not succeed the first time, and on the second time the landing gear hit (the ground), then the nose did, and it caught fire,” another source stated.