Military Cargo Jet Crashes, 11 Killed

By Alexandra Odynova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: November 3, 2009 (Issue # 1523)

MOSCOW — A military cargo plane crashed Sunday shortly after taking off from a Sakha republic airport, killing all 11 crew members on board, emergency officials said.

The cause of the crash of the four-engine Il-76 jet was unknown. It came just weeks after aviation authorities temporarily grounded all Il-76s after one of them lost an engine during takeoff.

The Il-76 took off from the Mirny airport at about 8 a.m. Sunday and rose to an altitude of 15 meters before abruptly banking to the right, the Investigative Committee said in a statement. It flew 20 meters to 30 meters before it hit slag heap from an old ore mine, exploding into flames.

“Mirny airport officials saw a flash and fire,” the Interior Troops, a military unit within the Interior Ministry that owned the plane, said in a statement.

The crash occurred about a kilometer from the runway, investigators said. The remains of all 11 crew members were found among the debris, which covered an area of 500 square meters.

State television showed the twisted, charred metal of the plane scattered over white snow. Little was recognizable other than a burned-out engine, several tires and the battered tail, still emblazoned with the Russian flag.

The flight recorders were found and taken away for examination, investigators said.

The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case over suspected violations of flight and flight preparation rules. The investigators did not elaborate on the possible causes of the accident Sunday.

The Interior Troops said the weather was fair at the time of the crash, with 10-kilometer visibility, winds gusting up to 6 meters per second and a temperature of minus 24 degrees Celsius.

The plane had arrived in Mirny from the Kaluga region and was flying without cargo to Irkutsk en route to the North Caucasus for a military personnel exchange, the Interior Troops said. It was being piloted by seven crew members, and the other four were relief crew.

The plane was built in 1989, according to the Aero Transport Data Bank, an international aircraft registry.

It was the second accident involving an Il-76 in less than a month. The Air Force temporarily grounded all Il-76 planes after an engine fell off the wing of a plane during takeoff in Ivanovo on Oct. 7.

In the last major air disaster, an Aeroflot-Nord Boeing 737 jet crashed while preparing to land in Perm in September 2008, killing all 88 people on board. Investigators found alcohol in the blood of the pilot but blamed poor training for the crash. Aeroflot-Nord is a subsidiary of Aeroflot.

Separately, a private British-built BAE-125 plane flying from Moscow’s Vnukovo-3 Airport to Minsk crashed on its second attempt to land in Minsk in poor weather on Tuesday, killing all five people on board. Investigators said Thursday that there was no alcohol in the pilot’s blood.