88 killed in Russian plane crash

A passenger jet travelling from Moscow to the Ural Mountains city of Perm crashed as it was preparing to land early today, killing all 88 people aboard, officials said.

Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova said there was no indication of terrorism in the crash of the Boeing-737-500, which went down on the outskirts of the city of Perm around 3.15am (00.15am Irish time).

Flight 821, operated by an Aeroflot subsidiary, carried 82 passengers and six crew members, Aeroflot said in a statement. Among those killed were citizens from the United States, France, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Latvia.

The plane was on its approach to land amid low cloud cover when it crashed into an unpopulated area of the city, just a few hundred yards from residential buildings. Aeroflot officials said the plane was circling at about 3,600ft in “difficult weather conditions” when it lost contact with ground dispatchers.

The most likely cause of the crash was technical failure, Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the federal prosecutors’ Investigative Committee, said in televised comments.

A section of rail track was destroyed in the crash, which scattered paper, clothing, life preservers and parts of engines for several hundred yards along the track. Sections of the plane’s fuselage reading “Aeroflot” and “Boeing” lay askew on the rails.

Part of the Trans-Siberian railway was also shut down as a result of the rail damage, said Alexander Burataeva, a spokesman for the national railroad company.

Officials said there were no deaths on the ground; investigators had found the plane’s “black box” flight recorders and were working to analyse them.

Pavel Shevchenko, a 36-year-old Perm resident who lives just 300 yards from the site of the crash, said he was awoken by an explosion and ran outside. He said debris was scattered around the area, along a section of tracks destroyed by the impact of the plane, but the heat from the flames kept him from getting closer.

He said a neighbour who witnessed the crash told him the plane hit the ground sharply – at a 30 or 40 degree angle. He said he feared his acquaintances or friends could be among the dead.

“It’s awful. There’s just no words to describe it. Perm is a small town, everybody knows everybody else here,” said Shevchenko.

Perm is about 750 miles east of Moscow.

Russia and the other former Soviet republics have some of the world’s worst air traffic safety records, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Experts have blamed weak government controls, poor pilot training and a cost-cutting mentality among many carriers that affects safety.

No problems were reported with the 15-year-old jet when it was last inspected at the beginning of 2008, Aeroflot Deputy Director Lev Koshlyakov said.

“Aeroflot has a good reputation in the field of safety,” Koshlyakov said at Moscow’s Sheremyetevo airport, from where the flight had departed. The incident is “a hard blow for our reputation”.

Among those reported killed was Gennady Troshev, a former army general who served in Chechnya and was sacked in 2002 by then-President Vladimir Putin. Troshev allegedly tolerated rampant rights abuses when he commanded forces in the war-ravaged republic.

Today’s crash was the second involving a Boeing 737 in the former Soviet Union in the past month. A Boeing flying from the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan to Iran crashed shortly after take off on August 24, killing 64 of the 90 people on board.

The pilot of that plane has been detained by prosecutors in connection with the investigation, officials said this week.