Brakes the likely cause of Russian plane crash

Faulty brakes may be to blame for a Russian airliner sliding off the runway and smashing onto a highway near Moscow, killing five people, a member of the crash investigation team said yesterday.

Investigators said they were examining the black boxes to try to determine the cause of Saturday’s crash, which cracked the wings off the Tupolev-204 plane and split the fuselage clean into three pieces.

If they find bad brakes were at fault, it would match a warning issued to the state-owned Tupolev by Russia’s aviation authority to fix problems with the brakes that may have caused a Tu-204 with 70 people onboard to go off a Siberian runway on Dec 21.