The initial rescue effort was done by the witnesses, who happened to be near the crash site.
“I carried three people out of the wreckage. One was either a girl or a woman, I could not tell but she was lighter than the man – it was hard to see, it was dark. Then there was a man, he also wasn’t heavy, he was lighter than me. Myself and another person, Father Andrew, also carried out a big man called Sergey. There was a third person helping us…” a witness said.
“Then we carried out two more people from the wreckage in the middle of the road. Another man reached out his hands towards me but I couldn’t make it to him – everything started exploding – I could not get any closer – everything was engulfed by fire. I’m sorry…” he added.
Eight people, including two children, have been saved from the burning debris. All have been rushed to hospital in a state of shock with burns and multiple injuries.
“We have received six patients with burns and physical trauma. Men, women and a 16-year-old girl. Four of them are in a critical condition. We're doing what we can. It's too early to make any prognosis,” Elissan Shandalovich, chief doctor at the hospital said.
Some of he patients may be transferred to Moscow, if their condition permits.
It has now been confirmed that the other 44 people on board have been killed. There are also reports that there were eight children among the passengers.
One of the people who died was a Swedish rescue worker, another one was from the Netherlands, according to the Emergencies Ministry. Two victims were Ukrainian. There was also a family of four with dual Russian-American citizenship. The rest of the passengers were Russian citizens.
There could have been more victims in the incident because the Tupolev crash landed close to a number of houses next to the highway. Luckily, the only object on the ground it reportedly damaged was a parked car.
Landing lights outage linked to crash
The Emergencies Ministry says that at the moment the cause of the catastrophe could be anything from pilot error to a mechanical fault, or possibly heavy fog. A criminal case and investigation have been opened.
“At the moment we are inspecting the site of the crash. Fragments of the plane are being found in a 300-meter wide area. We’ve found and retrieved flight recorders. We’ve taken records of communication between the crew and the ground services from the airport. We’ve also retrieved documents and fuel samples from Domodedovo Airport in Moscow,” a spokesman for Russia’s Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin said.
The vice-chairman of the Interstate Aviation Committee and the head of the Aviation Accident Investigation Commission, Aleksey Morozov, has made a statement admitting that the landing lights at Petrozavodsk airport were off when the plane Tupolev approached to land, and that this together with adverse weather conditions could have caused the tragedy.
The lights outage may have been caused by the airliner itself, Nikolay Fedotov, chair of the local committee for civilian safety told the media. He said the Tupolev went 150 to 200 meters off course as it approached the runway and hit the high-voltage power line. The collision cut the power supply, and it took several seconds for the backup supply to switch on. Meanwhile, the aircraft hit several treetops with its wing and crashed, the official said.
The Tupolev Tu-134 is a twin-engine airliner designed in the early 1960s in the USSR. The model has been in operation in more than 40 countries, but the largest fleet of Tu-134s is still in Russia. The aircraft, which crashed on Monday night, was commissioned in 1980.
In 2007 the Russian transport minister, Igor Levitin, called the Tu-134 an old and outdated airliner that needed to be replaced by the Sukhoi Superjet 100 or foreign equivalents within five years. There are 28 recorded crashes – including this latest one – for this model.
No comments:
Post a Comment