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Rabat – An Antonov An-24 plane, carrying 43 passengers and 6 crew members, crashed on Thursday morning into a remote area of Siberia. Five of the passengers,who were on board the flight, are reported to have been children.
There has been no sign that any of the 49 people on board the disaster have survived the crash. The wreckage has been sighted and photographed by a helicopter.
The rescue helicopter had been sent to investigate after the air traffic controllers lost connection with the Soviet-era aircraft close to the destination of the crash.
Video footage reportedly from the helicopter showed that the plane had come down in a densely forested area of the Siberian wilderness. Aerial photographs also show that the plane had caught fire during the descent.
The plane was flying from the city of Blagoveshchensk on the Russian-Chinese border to the remote town of Tynda, which is a journey over a largely uninhabited area.
The media has said that the plane was flying in an area that consisted of difficult terrain and that the weather conditions during the flight were temperamental.
After the airline had crashed, the regional governor, Vasily Orlov, said that “all necessary forces and means have been deployed in a search for the plane.”
The regional civil defense and fire safety center was deployed, and according to a director of Tynda Airport, “the plane caught fire upon impact, and a Mi-8 helicopter flying over the area reported no signs of survivors.”
The transport prosecutor’s office in the Far East reported that the site of the crash was around 15km south of the destination airport in Tynda.
Antonov An-24 Passenger jets are a historical Soviet style aircraft and are operated by the Angara airline in Siberia. These aircraft are among the oldest in operation, having been used for 50 years.
Russia has taken steps to switch Soviet aircraft to more modern jets, but older aircraft have continued to be in operation in far-flung regions of Siberia, despite frequent accidents.
Rescue operations will continue to try and gain access to the crash site, but it is a difficult area to land in and will take time.
This comes during a particularly bad month and a half for airlines, in the aftermath of both the Air India crash in Ahmedabad and the Bangladeshi air disaster earlier this week.
