A Russian cargo plane crashed on Tuesday killing a crew of 11 and continuing an ominous streak of deadly transport catastrophes over the past few months.
An Antonov An-12 transport aircraft crashed shortly after its pilots reported fire in one of the four turboprop engines and requested emergency landing. The accident occurred shortly after the plane took off from Magadan to Chukotka, in Russia’s Far East, with a cargo of 18 tonnes. It was the oldest aircraft in Russian aviation, in service since 1963.
The crash came a day after another Antonov aircraft, An-24, carrying 36 passengers and a crew of five skidded off the runway and broke apart while landing in stormy weather in Blagoveshchensk on China's border. It was a miraculous escape for 41 people onboard, even though 12 people were injured.
Less than a month earlier, seven people were killed when another An-24 with 37 people onboard attempted an emergency landing onto the Ob River in Siberia after an engine fire.
A total of 47 people were killed on June 20 when a Tupolev Tu-134 plane crashed during landing near Petrozavodsk, the capital city of the Republic of Karelia, which is one of Russia’s federal subjects. Only five people survived the accident.
After the Tu-134 catastrophe President Dmitry Medvedev ordered airlines to modernise the Soviet-era regional aircraft or take them off the service. However, the cost of upgrade in many cases will equal the market price of aged aircraft, while grounding the workhorses of Russian regional aviation will leave vast hard-to-reach areas of Siberia and the Far East without transport and cut them off from the rest of Russia.
Russia’s worst transport accident so far this year happened a month ago, when a Volga River cruise ship sank, killing about 130 people. Investigators found that the 56-year-old boat was totally unseaworthy and had 200 people onboard, 50 per cent more than it was allowed.
The catastrophes highlighted the industrial crisis of colossal proportions that Russia has suffered in the past two decades and the abominable state of safety regulations and controls. It was only this year that the first airliner to have been built since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Su-100 Superjet, went into series production. And there are no passenger boats at all that have been built in post-Soviet Russia.
