According to the investigators, 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 Moscow’s busiest airport on Sunday.
Dramatic footage shared on social media showed Aeroflot’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft, land at Sheremetyevo international airport, flames and black smoke pouring from its fuselage. The video also shows passengers leaping onto an inflatable slide at the front and running from the blazing plane as huge black columns of smoke billowed into the sky.
Aeroflot plane crash: Russia jet ‘struck by lightning
The Investigative Committee said in a statement, “There were 78 people including crew members on board the plane,” and added that it had headed to the northwest Russian city of Murmansk.
What have crew and passengers said?
One passenger who survived the crash, Pyotr Yegorov, was quoted as saying that the flight “had just taken off and the aircraft was hit by lightning”, adding: “The landing was rough – I almost passed out from fear.”
Another survivor, Mikhail Savchenko, said he managed to escape by jumping out onto the emergency exit slides at the front of the Aeroflot jet while the rear was ablaze.
They further added, “According to the updated info which the investigation has as of now, 37 people survived.”
The Moscow region’s health minister, Dmitry Matveyev told that Another 11 people were injured. Three of them had been hospitalised but they were not in a serious condition
Investigators said that the investigation is underway and they are looking into various lines of inquiry. They further added that it will be premature to draw any conclusions about the cause of the accident.
Some passengers blamed bad weather and lightning.
“We took off and then lightning struck the plane,” the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr Egorov, as saying.
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“The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were so scared, we almost lost consciousness.
The plane jumped down the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground.”
President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed their condolences and ordered investigators to establish what had happened. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has also ordered a special committee to investigate the disaster.
Russian news agencies reported that injured passengers were being treated in hospitals.
