All 18 people aboard an aging Russian passenger plane miraculously survived with only cuts and bruises after the aircraft was forced to make a hard landing and overturned in Siberia on Friday, officials said.
The twin-engine Antonov An-28 turboprop was flying from the town of Kedrovy to the regional capital of Tomsk when communication with it was lost, said local Gov. Sergei Zhvachkin’s office, according to Agence France-Presse.
Fears had swirled over the fate of the plane, its passengers and three crew members when it disappeared from radar.
Rescuers who rushed to the area where contact was lost eventually located the survivors in a wooded section near the badly damaged plane, which was found upside down, Reuters reported.
“We all believed in a miracle, and thanks to the professionalism of the pilots, it happened — everyone is alive,” Zhvachkin said in a statement.
The pilots of the plane, operated by Siberian Light Aviation, were forced to make an emergency landing because of what appears to have been engine failure, although that was not yet conclusive, the Russian TASS news agency cited a source as saying.
The aviation agency said the plane was found 96 miles from the airstrip in Tomsk.
Zhvachkin said all of the passengers and crew were taken to a local hospital. The Interfax news agency cited a local official as saying six passengers refused to be evacuated by helicopter and would be travelling instead by minibus.
TASS reported that the plane had passed all safety checks but cited a SiLA executive as saying the flight had been delayed by 10 hours because of inclement weather.
A local transport official told Interfax that the plane was built in 1989 and used by the Russian airline Aeroflot and in ex-Soviet Kyrgyzstan before going into service with SiLA in 2014.
The incident comes after a similar aircraft, an Antonov An-26, crashed earlier this month in Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula, killing all 28 people on board.
In 2012, an Antonov An-28 slammed into a Kamchatka forest, killing 10 people, Reuters reported. Investigators said both pilots were drunk at the time of the crash.
Russian aviation safety standards have improved in recent years, but accidents, especially involving old planes in far-flung regions, are not uncommon.
Antonovs were manufactured during the Soviet era and are still used throughout the former USSR for civilian and military transport, according to Agence France-Presse.
In February 2018, an Antonov An-148 operated by Saratov Airlines crashed near Moscow shortly after take-off, killing all 71 people on board, AFP reported.
An investigation later concluded that the accident was caused by human error.
In May 2019, a Sukhoi Superjet belonging to Aeroflot crash-landed and caught fire on a Moscow runway, killing 41 people.