Incidents / Accidents graves

At least five occupants of a Russian-operated Antonov An-24 have been killed after it ditched on the River Ob during a domestic flight.
Russia's Angara Airlines, which was operating the services, stated that the aircraft suffered a fire in its left engine prior to attempting an "emergency landing on water".
It had been operating as flight IK9007 between Tomsk and Surgut but came down at Strezhevoy, 63km east of Nizhnevartovsk, itself 120km east of Surgut.
Angara Airlines said the fire occurred at 04:54UTC while the ditching took place about 15min later, at 05:10.
"The decision to ditch was taken because the left engine caught fire during flight," said the carrier.


It said there were 33 passengers and four crew members - two pilots, an engineer and flight attendant - on board the twin-engined aircraft.
Twenty of those on board have been taken to hospital and four are in serious condition, added the carrier.
Angara added that it was trying to establish further details on possible casualties.
Russia's emergency situations ministry stated that the aircraft did not catch fire but broke into three sections, coming to rest on a sand bank in shallow water.

nvestigators are expected to focus on the flammability of cargo carried by an Asiana Airlines Boeing 747-400 freighter that crashed Thursday off the coast of South Korea in the East China Sea, killing both pilots. The aircraft was destroyed.

According to the airline and South Korean government officials, the pilots reported a fire and control problems about 1 hr. into the flight and were diverted to Jeju when contact was lost.

According to Flight Safety Foundation's Aviation Safety Network, the 747F departed Seoul Incheon at 3:05 am bound for Shanghai Pudong. South Korea Deputy Transport Minister Kim Han-Young told reporters that "the crew told Shanghai traffic controllers that fire had erupted in the hold." He added, "We suspect some flammable material caught fire there."

The CF6-powered freighter was carrying 58 tonnes of cargo, including 0.4 tonnes of materials such as lithium batteries, paint, amino acid solution and synthetic resin. According to The Korea Times, Asiana CEO Yoon Young-Doo said, "We load and manage lithium batteries according to the regulations set by the International Air Transport Assn. The goods on the cargo plane were also managed according to the checklist and double-checked by the captain."

The captain had 14,123 hr. of flight time, of which 6,896 were on the 747. The co-pilot had 5,211 hr. of flight time. The aircraft that crashed had its first flight in February 2006, according to ASN.

While there is discussion about a possible cargo-hold fire, there has been no conclusion reached regarding the crash's cause, authorities stressed. US FAA last year issued a Safety Alert for Operators on carriage of lithium batteries as cargo on aircraft

Pilot error was to blame for the plane crash that devastated Yaroslavl's elite Lokomotiv hockey team last month, Kommersant reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources within the investigation.
After a series of tests designed to reproduce conditions onboard the Yak-42 prior to the crash, specialists at the Gromov Test Flight Institute confirmed that the plane failed to gain enough speed at takeoff because one of the pilots hit the brakes.

Forty-four were killed when the chartered jet, operated by Yak-Service and carrying Lokomotiv to Minsk for its first regular-season game, crashed shortly after takeoff.

The only survivor, mechanic Alexander Sizov, said in an interview last week with Channel One that the plane was slow to take off but that he didn't feel any jerky motions, as might be expected if the pilot had slammed on the brakes.

Mechanical failure, bad fuel and a collision with a navigation beacon shortly after takeoff were other early theories, but these appear to have been ruled out by investigators from the Interstate Aviation Committee.

It is unclear why one of the pilots would have applied the brakes during takeoff.

Some 15s before impact the captain queried the aircraft's position. While the co-pilot's response appeared to suggest the jet was 1nm (1.85km) from the runway threshold, the inquiry found that it was actually 1.6nm away and flying below the normal glidepath.

There followed a series of automatic height call-outs, from 50ft to 10ft, but the inquiry does not indicate any attempt to abort the approach. The Embraer flew through the fog "until ground impact", it says, while the pilots were "unable to see the runway" and "did not establish the necessary visual references".