Russian airliner crashes killing 71 aboard
The Saratov Airlines, An-148 from Russia, en route to the city of Orsk in the Ural Mountains, has crashed after taking-off from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport with 65 passengers and six crew on board. The airlines vanished minutes after take-off and crashed near Argunovo, about 50miles ( 80km) sout-east of Moscow.
There are reported to be no survivors and pieces of wreckage and bodies were found spread over a large areas and one of the flight recorders has been recovered according to officials.
This is the first commercial passenger jet crash for more than a year as 2017 was the safest year on record for air travel.
The plane took off at 11:27 GMT (14:27 local time) on Sunday 11th February 2018, as contact was lost within four minutes. The Flight-tracking site Flightradar24 said it then descended at the rate of 1000m (3, 300ft) per minute. The plane was being flown by an experienced pilot with 5, 000 hours of flight time, the airline told Ria-Novosti news agency. The last two major Russian plane crashes in recent years were on 25th December 2016 where a Tu-154 military airliner crashed into the Black Sea with a loss of 92 people on board, and a Russian Airbus A321 carrying tourists crashed in Sinai, Egypt with the loss of 224 people aboard on 31 October 2015, the Islamic State group claimed it had placed a bomb aboard.