Seven die in Russian plane crash

A Russian airliner attempting to land in heavy fog in the central Russian city of Samara landed short of the runway, scraped along the landing strip and overturned. Seven people died and at least 26 were injured, authorities and company officials said.

Prosecutors investigating the incident said they were considering bad weather and pilot error among the most likely causes of the crash.

The plane was a Tu-134 passenger jet belonging to the Russian airline UTAir, and the accident was sure to renew concerns about the ageing plane model that is the workhorse of the Russian civil aviation industry and that transport officials had ordered gradually phased out.

The plane, carrying 50 passengers and 7 crew, had been en route from the Siberian city of Surgut to the western city of Belgorod with a stop in Samara, a city on the Volga river, about 550 miles south-east of Moscow.

Spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry Sergei Salov said that seven people died and 26 were wounded, including three crew members. Prosecutors put the number of wounded at 31.

Russian television showed the plane’s wrecked fuselage lying on thick snow several yards from the landing strip, its wings, tail and engine scattered about as rescuers worked to evacuate surviving victims and bodies of the dead and police searched for clues to the crash.

Yuri Naryshkin, spokesman for regional emergency authorities said the plane touched down before the landing strip, then ploughed through the runway and overturned.

Earlier a local emergency official had said the plane landed on its fuselage after the landing gear failed to come down, according to Russian media reports.

Emergency officials said they had retrieved the plane’s flight recorders and would study them to determine what led to the crash.

Passengers’ relatives waited anxiously for news at airports in the three cities on the plane’s route. A woman at a Belgorod airport said that her daughter had been taken to hospital with a spinal injury and her 2 1/2-year-old grandson was in a state of shock.

Tu-134s are widely used in the former Soviet Union. The last major crash of a Russian airliner was on August 22, when a Tu-154 of Pulkovo Airlines crashed in Ukraine, killing all 170 people aboard.

Last month, Transport Minister Igor Levitin ordered the ageing Tu-134 and Tu-154 models phased out of civilian use over the next five years.