Ministry of Emergency Situations experts survey Vladivostokavia Tu-154 plane crush site near Irkutsk, about 4,200 km east of Moscow, Wednesday July 4, 2001. The Russian airliner crushed and burned in a forested area killing all 145 people aboard. The plane was on route from Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains to Vladivostok, the major port on Russia‘s Pacific Coast, tried twice to land in Irkutsk, where it was to refuel, and crushed while making a third attempt to land. Letters in Cyrillic on the screen read: Irkutsk region, village of Burdakovka.
PHOTO – TASR/AP
YEKATERINBURG, Russia - Sirens wailed and flags were lowered to half mast last Thursday as Russia observed a day of mourning for 145 people killed in the country‘s worst air disaster in years.
Experts who sifted through charred wreckage in a clearing in Siberian woods said they had no explanation why the Tupolev Tu-154 jet plunged to the ground from 850 metres as it made its third approach to Irkutsk on Tuesday night, killing all 136 passengers and nine crew. Relatives of victims were flown from opposite ends of the country to the centre of Siberia to attempt to identify bodies laid out in an Irkutsk city morgue.
Factory bells and sirens rang out, calling for a moment of silence in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, where the doomed plane took off on Tuesday evening bound for Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. At the charred crash site, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, head of a commission set up to determine the cause of the crash, told journalists the damaged „black box“ flight recorders had so far yielded few clues. Klebanov said his commission hoped to have more information after further analysis of the flight recorder data.
President Vladimir Putin ordered flags lowered across the nation for Thursday‘s day of mourning and asked for entertainment programmes to be struck from television schedules. Newscasters wore black.
SAFETY UNDER SCRUTINY
Whatever the cause of the crash, it drew attention to the safety of Russia‘s ageing, mostly Soviet-era civil air fleet. Putin ordered the government to look into safety standards, and asked aviation officials to report on the fleet‘s condition. The doomed flight was operated by VladivostokAvia, one of hundreds of „babyflots“ — tiny domestic carriers that split off of Aeroflot, once the world‘s largest airline, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Aeroflot, still Russia‘s flagship carrier on international routes, has often called for tougher safety and financial regulations to force weaker airlines to stop flying.
The United Nations aviation arm has blasted Russia for inadequate aircraft maintenance standards, poor staff training and inadequate investigation procedures. But Russian civil air officials say most of the problems in recent years were on military flights, outside their control. VladivostokAvia said it had bought the doomed Soviet-built airplane only two months ago from a Chinese company and had overhauled it. First introduced in 1972, the three-engine Tu-154 is the main medium-range workhorse of Russia‘s civil aviation fleet.
Reuters
