Russian Airbus crash in Siberia kills 140
July 11th, 2006 | by Dusk |
News
At least 140 people died when a Russian Airbus plane veered off a runway and caught fire while landing Sunday in the Siberian provincial centre of Irkutsk, officials said.
‘49 people are in hospital. 11 people left the plane and walked away — we are appealing for them to come back,’ an official at Irkutsk said.
202 people were on board the Sibir airline plane bound from Moscow, including a group of children on their way to a holiday, according to different officials.
Other News
122 killed. 55 people, among them 6 children, are at Irkutsk hospitals and 17 A310 passengers are at home, but asked for physiological aid. Another news reported.
“The fragments of 9 bodies, found at the crash site, have yet to be identified. Pending identification procedures, nine passengers will be considered unaccounted for,” a regional emergency situations center official said.
An Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman confirmed to Interfax Monday citing updated reports, that only 72 people had been rescued, but no confirmation was provided for reports that fragments of nine bodies had been found.
The A310 airliner, Flight 778 from Moscow to Irkutsk, was carrying 203 people, among them 193 passengers, 8 crew and two Sibir Airlines employees in addition to the listed passengers. It was also carrying 5,500 kilograms of cargo.
The incident occurred when the Airbus A310 careered off the tarmac during landing and crashed into a concrete wall close to airport buildings, bursting into a huge wall of flame, the emergency situations ministry said.
It was the second recent crash of an Airbus plane in Russia, after an Armenian Airbus A320 crashed into the Black Sea near Sochi in May killing all 113 on board.
No definite reason for the crash has yet been put forward, but officials said that the black box flight recorders have been found and sent to Moscow for examination.
‘There are many versions,’ the spokesman for the emergency situations ministry said.
‘The landing gear may have caught fire while landing, igniting the rest of the plane. Or there was a short circuit while the plane was still in the air, which disabled the brakes,’ he said.
In the Malaysia news paper the plane was said to have some braking failure and hit some warehouse and burst into flames. Until officials release the the actual cause of the accidents, nothing is certain.
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I feel sorry for those who lost their family and friends on this crash. Investigators will find a what cause this accident and hopefully it will never happen again.
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