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Thursday, August 26, 2004
2 Russian Planes Crash, 90 Dead
(AFP Photo) - 89 dead in twin Russian plane crashes, "terror" probed
(Thu 26 Aug, 03:19 AM)
Two Russian passenger jets crashed Tuesday night, August 24, almost simultaneously after taking off from the same airport, killing all 90 passengers and crew aboard.
One of the planes, a Tupolev 134 operated by the regional carrier Volga-Express carrying 44 people on a flight from Moscow to the southern city of Volgograd, went down late Tuesday outside Tula around 180 kilometers (112 miles) south of Moscow, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The wreckage of that plane was located quickly and deaths of all passengers and crew aboard the plane confirmed by the Russian emergency situations ministry.
Officials said witnesses saw an explosion before that plane crashed, Interfax said.
At almost precisely the same time as the Volga-Express plane went down, a larger Tupolev 154 passenger jet owned by the carrier Sibir and carrying 46 people from Moscow to the Black Sea resort of Sochi also disappeared from radar screens.
The wreckage of the second plane and human body parts were found Wednesday scattered across a field outside the southern city of Rostov-on-Don, Russian media reported.
There was no immediate announcement of a death toll, but it appeared unlikely that anyone aboard could have survived.
One of that plane's black boxes was also recovered, Interfax news agency reported.
There were no reports of any foreigners aboard either of the flights.
Varying Reports
There were various reports that an alarm of some kind had been triggered in the Sibir plane as it was going down.
Interfax news agency quoted a local official as saying the alarm signaled that an attack against the crew was in progress.
An unnamed source with the air traffic control authority in the Moscow region told ITAR-TASS news agency that a coordinated terrorist strike on the airliners could not be ruled out.
The government-run RIA Novosti news agency however said the alarm was a standard distress signal that could have been triggered for a number of different reasons.
President Vladimir Putin, currently on holiday in Sochi himself, ordered the country's security services to investigate the circumstances of the crashes 'without delay'.
The local prosecutor's office in Rostov-on-Don had already opened an investigation into a possible «crime against transport safety», ITAR-TASS said.
The Tupolev-134 that went down outside Tula was manufactured in 1977 and underwent a thorough overhaul in February 1996, according to employees at the airport in Volgograd cited by Russian media reports.
The Tupolev-154 that crashed near Rostov went into service in 1982, according to data from Sibir. The plane was renovated in 1993 when it had nearly 31,000 hours on its flight counter. The lifespan of the plane is set at 37,000 hours.
In the past five years, a total of 764 people have been killed in airplane accidents in Russia , according to a report published last April by the Russian legislature.
That report said 60 percent of those accidents were linked directly to lapses in Russian aviation safety regulations.
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