4 killed, 4 injured in Moscow airliner crash
MOSCOW (AP) - A passenger airliner careered off the runway at Russia's third-busiest airport and partly onto a highway while landing on Saturday, broke into pieces and caught fire, killing at least four people.
Officials said there were eight people aboard the Tu-204 belonging to Russian airline Red Wings that was flying back from the Czech Republic without passengers to its home at Vnukovo Airport.
Emergency officials said in a televised news conference that four people were killed and another four severely injured when the plane rolled off the runway into a snowy field and partly onto an adjacent highway, then disintegrated. No collisions with vehicles on the major, multilane highway were reported.
The plane's cockpit area was sheared off from the fuselage and a large chunk gashed out near the tail.
The crash occurred amid light snow and winds gusting up to 15 meters a second (30 mph), but other details were not immediately known. A spokesman for Russia's top investigative agency, Vladimir Markin, said initial indications were that pilot error was the cause.
The state news agency RIA Novosti cited an unidentified official at the Russian Aviation Agency as saying another Red Wings Tu-204 had gone off the runway at the international airport in Novosibirsk in Siberia on Dec. 20. The agency said that incident, in which no one was injured, was due to the failure of the plane's engines to go into reverse upon landing and that its brake system malfunctioned.
On Friday, the Aviation Agency sent a directive to the Tupolev company's president calling for it to take urgent preventive measures.
Vnukovo airport spokeswoman Yelena Krylova said it had enough personnel and equipment to keep the runway fully functional Saturday. The airport resumed receiving planes after a break of several hours.
Prior to Saturday's crash, there had been no fatal accidents reported for Tu-204s, which entered commercial service in 1995. The plane is a twin-engine midrange jet with a capacity of about 210 passengers.
Vnukovo, on the southern outskirts of Moscow, is one of the Russian capital's three international airports.
___
Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this story
Officials said there were eight people aboard the Tu-204 belonging to Russian airline Red Wings that was flying back from the Czech Republic without passengers to its home at Vnukovo Airport.
Emergency officials said in a televised news conference that four people were killed and another four severely injured when the plane rolled off the runway into a snowy field and partly onto an adjacent highway, then disintegrated. No collisions with vehicles on the major, multilane highway were reported.
The plane's cockpit area was sheared off from the fuselage and a large chunk gashed out near the tail.
The crash occurred amid light snow and winds gusting up to 15 meters a second (30 mph), but other details were not immediately known. A spokesman for Russia's top investigative agency, Vladimir Markin, said initial indications were that pilot error was the cause.
The state news agency RIA Novosti cited an unidentified official at the Russian Aviation Agency as saying another Red Wings Tu-204 had gone off the runway at the international airport in Novosibirsk in Siberia on Dec. 20. The agency said that incident, in which no one was injured, was due to the failure of the plane's engines to go into reverse upon landing and that its brake system malfunctioned.
On Friday, the Aviation Agency sent a directive to the Tupolev company's president calling for it to take urgent preventive measures.
Vnukovo airport spokeswoman Yelena Krylova said it had enough personnel and equipment to keep the runway fully functional Saturday. The airport resumed receiving planes after a break of several hours.
Prior to Saturday's crash, there had been no fatal accidents reported for Tu-204s, which entered commercial service in 1995. The plane is a twin-engine midrange jet with a capacity of about 210 passengers.
Vnukovo, on the southern outskirts of Moscow, is one of the Russian capital's three international airports.
___
Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this story
Those pictures are terrifying. While it's great that there weren't more people on board, it seems strange somehow that the plane crashed under those circumstances. Were the pilots not paying enough attention to what they were doing?
@medborgare "Were the pilots not paying attention"? What? Look at the conditions, Siberia to start with, sub zero conditions which can cause multiple anomolies with engine, fuel, hydraulic and multiple other systems, let alone the ice on the runway, the possibllity of wind shear, high crosswinds, or vorticies from other departing aircraft are numerable. To think they weren't paying attention when never having a fatality in the airlines history, is a bit of an insult. Pilots are always the first to get blamed, and 99% of the time get the blame in the end regardless of circumstances, but is a usual comment by those not educated in the aviation field.
 @flyroy No disrespect to the pilots was intended. Thanks for your insight, you apparently know a lot about it. I'm really just curious as to what happened, as the fact remains that airplane crashes are pretty rare.
they said red wings