Bad weather is blamed for the crash, which killed at least 45 children leaving a resort popular with families.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published August 23, 2006
SUKHA BALKA, Ukraine - Pulkovo Airlines Flight 612 was packed with families, tourists and others returning to the Russian city of St. Petersburg after soaking up the sun and saltwater on the Black Sea.
Thunderstorms roiled the air over eastern Ukraine, and the pilots of the Tupolev Tu-154 passenger jet chose to steer higher to avoid the turbulence.
Then something went wrong. The crew sent distress signals. And shortly thereafter, the plane fell to the earth, killing all 170 people on board, including dozens of children, according to Mykhaylo Korsakov, spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in Donetsk, Ukraine.
Ukrainian and Russian emergency officials tried to make sense out of the third passenger plane crash involving Russia this year.
Authorities ruled out terrorism. Ukrainian officials said a storm, accompanied by heavy winds, driving rain and flashes of lightning, was raging through the region at the time.
Korsakov said the pilot asked to make an emergency landing before disappearing from the radar screens.
The plane was en route from Anapa - a Russian resort on north shore of the Black Sea known for its children's summer camps - to St. Petersburg when it ran into trouble over Ukraine. Two minutes after the crew sent a distress signal, it dropped off the radar, said Russian emergency official Yulia Stadnikova.
Residents of Sukha Balka, a village north of Donetsk and some 400 miles east of Kiev, found part of the plane's tail section and still-burning pieces of debris in a swampy field.
Of the 170 people on board, 45 were children, said Pulkovo Airlines deputy director Anatoly Samoshin. The list of passengers, most from St. Petersburg, appeared to include many families.
Investigators were searching for the flight data recorders commonly called black boxes.
Samoshin said the pilot decided to climb about 3,300 feet to try to get above the storm. But as the plane ascended from 29,500 to 36,000 feet, the pilot sent the first distress signal. Later, the pilot sent two more distress signals, the last from 9,800 feet, he said.
Ukraine Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Igor Krol said a fire broke out on the plane at 32,800 feet and the crew decided to try to make an emergency landing.
"The only known fact is that the weather was bad, there was a strong thunderstorm and poor visibility," Ukrainian emergency official Leonid Kastorsky told Russia's NTV at the site of the crash.
The crash occurred just two days before the second anniversary of near-simultaneous explosions on two planes over Russia. Those explosions, which killed 90 people, were blamed on Chechen terrorists.
Both Russian and Ukrainian officials said nothing indicated Tuesday's incident should be blamed on terrorism.
The crash "was not a terrorist attack," said Leonid Belyayev, acting director of Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry in St. Petersburg.
The 16-year-old plane had flown 5,600 miles since its last maintenance checkup, and was not immediately due for another check, Samoshin said. Pulkovo is among Russia's largest airlines.
The crash came less than two months after an Airbus A-310 of the Russian airline S7 skidded off a runway and burst into flames on July 9 in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, killing 124 people. On May 3, an A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia crashed into the Black Sea while trying to land in the Russian resort city of Sochi in rough weather, killing all 113 people aboard.
Russian-made Tu-154s are widely used by Russian airlines for many regional flights.
