Dramatic video from a home security camera captured the moment a Russian passenger plane crashed near Moscow minutes after take-off, killing all 71 people…
Dramatic video from a home security camera captured the moment a Russian passenger plane crashed near Moscow minutes after take-off, killing all 71 people aboard.
The Saratov Airlines jet went down about 44 miles southeast of Moscow after taking off from Domodedovo airport in the Russian capital and disappearing from radar at 2:28 p.m. Sunday.
Investigators concluded that the Antonov An-148 exploded when it hit the ground, Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said Monday, the Russian TASS news agency reported.
“It has been established that the aircraft was intact at the time of its descent and there was no combustion,” Petrenko said.
“The content of records of the flight recorders will enable experts of the IAC [Interstate Aviation Committee] to reconstruct the flight in detail and determine the cause of the crash,” she added.
Authorities are retrieving documents in the airline’s offices, including material on the regional jet’s maintenance and technical data, and the medical exams of the crew, she said.
“The investigators have obtained the samples of fuel, the files of radio exchange between flight controllers and the plane’s commander, the files of the system of tracking the airliner on the ground and in the air and the radar’s electronic data on the plane’s flight,” she said.
Both the flight data and voice recorders have been found at crash site, a source in the Interstate Aviation Committee also confirmed to TASS.
“They are both damaged. The flight recorders will be opened as soon as they are delivered, so tonight it will be possible to say for sure if they can be decoded,” the source told TASS.
There was no mayday call from pilot Valery Gubanov, who believe may have steered his stricken aircraft away from populated areas as part of a desperate attempt to make an emergency landing, the news outlet reported.
“He had a record of over 5,000 flight hours, including 2,147 hours of piloting An-148 aircraft,” said a spokesman for Saratov Airlines. “Second pilot Sergey Arsenovich Gambaryan had a record of 812 flight hours piloting this type of aircraft.”
Among the victims was 22-year-old Daria Tolmasova, the fiancée of Vladivostok ice hockey star Sergey Ilyin of the Admiral club, according to the DailyMail.com.
“She was only 22 years old. We express our most heartfelt condolences to our friend and his family. Stay strong Sergei,” his agent Shumi Babayev said.
Also killed was Swiss national Ulriсh Klauein, who was flying to Orsk to install a new piece of machinery at Orsk Oil and Gas Synthesis factory, the news site reported.
Five-year-old Nadezhda Krasova died along with her 32-year-old mother, Oksana Krasova, who were from Orsk, in the Orenburg region.
More than 300 fragments from the plane – which was carrying 65 passengers and six crew members en route to Orsk in the Urals — were found near the village of Stepanovskoye in the Ramensky district.
Some experts theorized the crash may have been caused by the failure of the plane’s anti-icing system — leading to possible ice in the engine.
Alfred Malinovsky, vice president of the Russian pilots trade union told the Russian Interfax news outlet: “The crash of the An-148 may have been caused by the collapse of the anti-icing system of the engine. Usually, crashes come as a result of multiple factors, several minor issues, each of them can be fatal.
Others, meanwhile, said they could not rule out terrorism.
Veteran civilian and Russian air force pilot Vitaly Sokolovsky told Gazeta.ru that “modern security systems in airports these days do not allow any stranger to get in, particularly with a bomb. But so far no single cause should be excluded.
“Moreover, there is information that the crew failed to report the emergency situation on board and did not request emergency landing. It means something extraordinary took place on board, an incident that made pilots fight for lives of passengers.”
But a source told the RBC news agency that “this theory is unlikely to become the main one since bomb technicians who carried out an express analysis of some of the aircraft debris found no micro-particles of explosives,” the DailyMail.com reported.
More than 900 people using equipment including drones were involved in the search operation, which has been reclassified as a recovery effort, officials said.
“We plan to carry out the main stage of the search operation in seven days because the plane debris is scattered over a very large area,” emergency services minister Vladimir Puchkov told Interfax, adding that “heavy snow” hampered searchers.
“We walked about 600 to 700 meters across a field, with snow in places waist-deep,” said Alexei Besedin, one of the first rescuers to reach the scene, according to Agence France-Presse.
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered “his profound condolences to those who lost their relatives in the crash,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
