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 the tail section partly torn away.
The crash occurred amid 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.
The plane that crashed Saturday took off from
Pardubice airport in the Czech Republic. Jan Anderlik, the director of
the company that operates the airport, told Czech public television that
the plane underwent a regular technical check before takeoff and no
problems were discovered.
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.
The Red Wings airline is one of the holdings of
Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, who also owns the British
newspapers The Independent and the Evening Standard.
Vnukovo, on the southern outskirts of Moscow, is one of the Russian capital's three international airports.
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