28 killed in regional passenger plane crash in Russia’s Far East. The aircraft, a twin-engine turboprop, crashed shortly before landing in Palana, a small settlement in northern Kamchatka, amid unfavorable weather conditions.
A total of 28 people , including passengers and crew, have lost their lives on Tuesday when they crashed in a plane in which they were traveling shortly before landing at a regional airport on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the Far East of Russia.
The device, a turboprop – powered Antonov An-26 , covered the route between Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka, the regional capital, and the small settlement of Palana , north of the cold and unpopulated peninsula. Nine years ago, another device manufactured by the Antonov company and covering the same route also collided, killing all but four of the people on board.
The Ria Nóvosti agency , citing sources close to the investigation, has cited the three possible causes of the accident: “adverse weather, a technical failure of the plane or a human error committed by the pilots.” Rescue teams found the remains of the device about nine kilometers from the destination airport .
Some pieces of fuselage fell into the nearby Sea of Okhotsk. Most of the passengers were originally from Palana, a small, isolated settlement of just 3,000 people in northern Kamchatka. The aforementioned peninsula comprises a territory similar in size to the island of Great Britain, although with a population equivalent to that of the city of Córdoba.
The wrecked plane belonged to a regional airline and had been in service since 1982. The An-26 is a model that ceased to be produced in the 1980s by the Soviet aeronautical industry and could be used for both civilian and military use. Its reliability among pilots is poor, as evidenced by the high number of accidents in which it has been involved in recent years.
