Russian officials say 48 people were killed when an Angara Airlines plane went down in a dense forest in the far-eastern Amur region.<\/p>\n
The Antonov An-24 plane, carrying 42 passengers and six crew, had left Blagoveshchensk close to the Chinese border and vanished from radar screens as it approached Tynda airport, officials said. <\/p>\n
A Russian civil aviation helicopter then spotted burning fuselage from the plane on a remote hillside about 16km (10 miles) from Tynda.<\/p>\n
Amur’s regional governor Vasily Orlov said five children were among those on board and declared three days of mourning.<\/p>\n
The remote, swampy nature of the area meant that rescuers took about an hour to reach the scene.<\/p>\n
Preliminary inquiries are looking at either pilot error in poor weather conditions or technical malfunction, according to emergency officials.<\/p>\n
The An-24 plane had been on the final leg of a route from Khabarovsk in the far south-east of Russia. Angara Airlines is based in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.<\/p>\n
The Antonov 24 plane was almost 50 years old and originally designed in Kyiv during the Soviet era, although this model has not been used in Ukraine for several years.<\/p>\n
Officials said the plane had passed a recent technical inspection, but the civil aviation authority told news agencies it had been involved in four incidents since 2018.<\/p>\n
Seven years ago its left wing had been damaged when the plane overran a runway and hit a lightning mast, Tass news agency said.<\/p>\n
Other An-24 planes have been involved in fatal crashes, too.<\/p>\n
An An-24RV veered off the runway as it landed at Nizhneangarsk Airport in July 2019. Two members of the flight crew were killed.<\/p>\n
In 2011, another Angara An-24 crashed into the Ob river in Siberia, killing seven passengers.<\/p>\n
After the 2011 crash, then-president Dmitry Medvedev said An-24 planes that were still in service in Russia should be grounded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russian officials say 48 people were killed when an Angara Airlines plane went down in a dense forest…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":88729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-88728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114908458529733077","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}