41 people died after the crash of a Russian airliner in Moscow

Forty – one people on board a Russian pbadenger aircraft Aeroflot were killed on Sunday, including two children, after the plane caught fire while he was making a landing. bumpy emergency in a Moscow airport, Russian investigators said.

A television sequence showed the crash of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 on the tarmac at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport, before the rear part of the aircraft suddenly caught fire.

Many pbadengers aboard SU 1492 then escaped via the aircraft's emergency barriers, which inflated after the hard landing.

The plane, which flew from Moscow to Murmansk in northern Russia, was carrying 73 pbadengers and five crew members, the Russian aviation watchdog said.

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for the Russian Investigative Committee, said in a statement that only 37 of the 78 people on board had survived, which means that 41 people lost their lives.

No official cause has been given for the disaster.

The investigation committee stated that it had opened an investigation and that it was trying to determine if the pilots had broken aviation safety rules.

Some pbadengers blamed bad weather and lightning.

"We took off and then lightning struck the plane," said the Komsomolskaya daily Pravda, one of the surviving pbadengers, Pyotr Egorov.

"The plane turned around and there was a hard landing. We were so scared that we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped on the runway like a grbadhopper and then caught fire on the ground. "

The public television broadcast images of his mobile phone filmed by another pbadenger and in which we could hear screams.

President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev presented their condolences and ordered the investigators to establish what had happened.

Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified "informed source" as saying the evacuation of the plane had been delayed by pbadengers who had insisted on picking up their carry-on luggage first.

Russian news agencies reported that injured pbadengers were being treated in hospitals.

DEBRIS IN THE ENGINES

The Flightradar24 follow-up service showed that the aircraft flew over Moscow twice before landing urgently after just under 30 minutes of flight.

The underside of the aircraft collapsed in shock and its engines caught fire.

According to one source, Interfax reportedly said that the plane had managed to land on the second attempt and that some aircraft systems had failed.

The emergency landing was so difficult that debris had entered the engines, causing a fire that quickly invaded the back of the fuselage, said the same source.

Russian investigators said they were looking at various versions.

Russian news agencies reported that the plane had been produced in 2017 and that it had been repaired as recently as in April of this year.

Aeroflot has long since been wiped out of its track record in post-Soviet security and now has one of the world's most modern fleets on international routes, where it uses Boeing and Airbus aircraft.

The Russian authorities want Aeroflot to buy more Sukhoi Superjets, a regional airliner, for domestic flights to support the country's new civil aviation industry. The plane is built in the Russian Far East.

A Sukhoi Superjet crashed in Indonesia in 2012, killing the 45 people on board in an accident attributed to human error.

The Superjet entered service in 2011 and was the first new pbadenger aircraft developed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

However, it was affected by sporadic concerns about safety and reliability, including a grounding in December 2016 after a defect was found in the tail of the aircraft.

Russian officials said Sunday that it was premature to talk about the grounding of the Sukhoi Superjet for the moment. The aircraft is mainly used by Russian airlines such as Aeroflot, but also by a few other foreign operators, including a low-cost Mexican airline.

Dozens of flights to Sheremetyevo were delayed because of the disaster.

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