Ten people died and four were injured Wednesday when a small plane crashed in Russia’s Far East in the country’s latest aviation disaster, the emergency ministry said.
Investigators were looking into the possible causes of why the plane came down 10 kilometres (six miles) short of its final destination, which included malfunction and pilot error.
The An-28 passenger plane made a hard emergency landing in the far-flung Kamchatka region after noon local time (midnight GMT), a spokeswoman with the Far Eastern branch of the emergency ministry said.
The twin-engine aircraft had 14 people on board including two crew, the spokeswoman told AFP by telephone from the city of Khabarovsk.
“Ten people have died and four were injured,” she said, adding that the injured were taken for treatment to the town of Palana.
The four survivors, all of them badly injured, were two women, a man, and a 13-year-old boy who is in a coma, the regional government said.
The plane took off from Kamchatka’s main airport Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky for a scheduled flight to Palana on the Okhotsk sea coast, but communications went dead at 12:28 pm (0028 GMT), the ministry said.
A rescue helicopter located the crash site and the survivors on a hill covered in cedar trees 10 kilometres (six miles) from Palana, a ministry statement said. The plane sustained “considerable damage,” it said.
Rescue workers had to clear away small trees to create a spot for the helicopter to land to take the injured to hospital.
The swampy area is hard to reach and the initial rescue team could only land nearly a kilometre (half a mile) away, said Kamchatka deputy governor Alexander Potiyevsky, according to the regional administration website.
The regional government declared a day of mourning Thursday and promised compensation of 200,000 rubles ($6,300) to the families of each of the victims.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said it had opened a criminal case into possible violation of air transport regulations. It was taking probes of the plane’s fuel and checking recorded communications of the crew.
“The investigation is looking at three versions of events: a technical problem, weather conditions, and actions of the crew,” the committee said.
According to the schedule of the Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky airport, the daily flight to Palana is operated by state-owned local carrier FGUPKAP.
Kamchatka is a long peninsula in the Russian Far East that lies north of Japan and is accessible practically only by air. Local media reported last month that the airport in Palana was due for repairs in 2012 which would include work on its landing strip.
Russia has a dismal aviation safety record, with older small planes that serve hard-to-reach Siberian and Far Eastern regions regularly making emergency landings.
In the latest deadly plane incident in April, a passenger plane with 43 on board crashed shortly after takeoff from the Tyumen airport in Siberia, killing 33 people.
