Russian officials hailed a "miracle" on
Friday after a passenger plane made an emergency landing in a Siberian
field and all 18 people on board emerged, suffering only cuts and
bruises.
The An-28 plane, operated by Siberian Light Aviation (SiLA),
was flying from the town of Kedrovy to Tomsk when communication was
lost, Governor Sergei Zhvachkin's office said.
The emergencies
ministry announced later that the plane had been found, apparently after
making a "hard landing", and that survivors had been spotted.
The aviation agency said the plane had been found 155 kilometres from the airstrip in Tomsk.
Zhvachkin's
office announced that everyone on board, including three crew, were
alive and that medics had "recorded mainly bruises and abrasions".
"We
all believed in a miracle. And thanks to the professionalism of the
pilots, it came true: everyone is alive," the governor said.
Images circling on social media showed the plane flipped upside down with dirt inside the cabin and its nose destroyed.
Zhvachkin
said that all of the passengers and crew would be taken to the regional
capital Tomsk, where they would be examined by doctors.
The
Interfax news agency cited a local official as saying that six
passengers refused to take a helicopter from the crash site to Tomsk and
would be travelling instead by minibus.
The
incident comes just 10 days after the crash of an An-26 plane in
Russia's far eastern Kamchatka peninsula, killing all 28 people on
board.
Antonov planes were manufactured during the Soviet era and are
still used throughout the former USSR for civilian and military
transport. They have been involved in a number of accidents in recent
years.
News agency TASS reported that the An-28 plane had passed all
safety checks but cited a SiLA executive as saying that the flight had
been delayed by 10 hours because of bad weather.
The An-28 is a twin-engine light turboprop plane with a usual capacity of 17 passengers.
A
local transport source told the Interfax news agency that the plane was
built in 1989 and used by Russian airline Aeroflot and in ex-Soviet
Kyrgyzstan before going into service with SiLA in 2014.
Russia, once notorious for plane accidents, has improved its air traffic safety record in recent years.
But poor aircraft maintenance and lax safety standards persist.
In
May 2019 a Sukhoi Superjet belonging to the flag carrier airline
Aeroflot crash-landed and caught fire on the runway of a Moscow airport,
killing 41 people.
In February 2018, a Saratov Airlines An-148
aircraft crashed near Moscow shortly after take-off, killing all 71
people on board. An investigation later concluded that the accident was
caused by human error.
Flying in Russia can also be dangerous in the
vast country's isolated regions with difficult weather conditions such
as the Arctic and the Far East.
7/16/2021 9:13:39 PM
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