A Moscow car driver was both fortunate to make it out alive and at the same time, unlucky to witness the wreckage caused by a Tupolev Tu-204 airplane belonging to Russian carrier Red Wings that careered off a Moscow runway on Saturday at the moment he was passing by with his car and his dash-camera turned on.
The twin-engined medium-range jet airliner that is capable of carrying up to 210 people, was arriving at the Vnukovo International Airport from the Czech Republic when for unknown reasons, it overshot a runway and crashed through the fence skidding onto a nearby highway.
According to Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations, there were eight crew members and no passengers on board the plane, four of which, including the two pilots, a flight engineer and a flight attendant, were killed instantly, with the rest critically injured.
“When the aircraft hit this very deep ditch it actually broke up. So it must have been going… very fast when it went over the end of the runway, and we can only speculate how it might have been so,” David Learmount, operations and safety editor from Flight Global Magazine, told RT News.
“We may well be looking at the misjudgment issue here, unless there were technical problems the crew had to deal with that we have no news of yet,” Learmount added.
This is the first time that a Tupolev TU-204 airliner has been involved in a fatal accident, though on March 22, 2010, an Aviastar Tupolev Tu-204 crash-landed short of the runway near Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport while trying to land at night under bad weather conditions, with investigators attributing the accident to pilot error.
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Story References: Jalopnik
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