Russian passenger plane carrying 49 crashes in wilderness near China

Times

5 days ago

Rescuers have located the burning wreckage of a passenger aircraft that disappeared from radar screens with 49 people on board as it approached a town in the Russian Far East.
Air traffic controllers lost contact with the An-24 turbo-prop at about 1pm local time— thought to be carrying 43 passengers and six crew — as it approached Tynda in the Amur region, which borders China.
Russian state news agencies cited the Ministry of Emergency Situations and local officials as saying a search helicopter had discovered a burning fuselage on a slope about ten miles (16km) from Tynda.
The helicopter was unable to land and rescue personnel were making their way to the site on foot.
The aerial inspection found no sign of survivors at the crash site, and everyone on board the plane was expected to have died, emergency officials said.
Vasily Orlov, the Amur governor, earlier said that according to preliminary data there were five children among the passengers.
'All necessary forces and means have been deployed to search for the plane,' he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
The An-24, which had a tail number dating it to 1976, was operated by the Siberia-based Angara Airlines. It had taken off from the city of Blagoveshchensk and apparently crashed when it was making a second approach to the runway in Tynda, after a first attempt had to be aborted.
Tynda is a town of about 35,000 people and is known as an important railway junction on the Baikal-Amur Mainline, or BAM, which traverses eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East, and was a flagship Soviet construction project.
A source told the Tass news agency that pilot error in poor weather conditions as the aircraft approached the town may have caused it to crash into a low hill. Other reasons were also possible, the source added.