A large Russian airliner carrying 16 crew home from flight duty crashed into woods shortly after take-off from Moscow's biggest airport yesterday, killing 14 people.
The Pulkovo Airlines Ilyushin Il-86, Russia's answer to the jumbo jet and capable of carrying up to 350 passengers, was setting off for its home base of St Petersburg, empty but for the flight and cabin crews, when it suddenly plunged to earth.
It was the second disaster involving a Russian-built plane in two days and the third this month. On Saturday, 83 people died when a Russian-built Sukhoi SU-27 jet fighter crashed at an air show in Lviv, Ukraine.
Although air safety standards in the former Soviet Union have been under scrutiny for years, aerospace industry data indicated that this was the first fatal crash of an Il-86 since it entered service in 1980.
Officials said two survivors had been pulled from the smoking, charred wreckage of the four-engined aircraft.
"According to our information two people survived the crash. One of them was seriously hurt and taken to hospital, the other was in shock and is also in hospital," Sergei Belyayev, general director of Sheremetyevo airport, told reporters.
Officials said no one on the ground had been hurt. "I have never seen anything like this in all my years of service. There were body parts lying all around," a policeman, one of the first to reach the scene, told Reuters. He did not want to be identified.
Interfax news agency quoted emergency services sources as saying rescue workers had recovered the remaining 14 bodies of those on board the plane. The Emergencies Ministry said recovery work continued at the site.
In the woods close to Moscow's Sheremetyevo-1 terminal, the plane's tail section was clearly visible protruding from the trees. The airliner cut a swathe through woodland around the airport and gouged a broad furrow in the earth.
A plume of pale grey smoke drifted over the scene as rescue workers sifted through the wreckage.
Belyayev said the plane, which was returning to St Petersburg after completing a routine flight to Moscow from the Black Sea resort of Sochi, came down about 700 metres from the airport.
The crash came a day after a Russian-built jet crashed into spectators in the world's worst air show disaster at Lviv in Ukraine, and almost a month after 71 people died when a Tupolev Tu-154 carrying Russian children to a holiday in Spain and a US-built Boeing-757 cargo plane collided over the Swiss-German border.
Officials said the Il-86's black box flight recorders had been retrieved and were being examined.
But the deputy head of the crash investigation, Leonid Kashirsky, said it was still too early to speculate on the cause.
"Nothing has been done so far really to shed any light on the incident, so it's too early to give any concrete reasons for the accident," he said.
A reporter for Russia's NTV television said he saw the plane climb sharply from Sheremetyevo-1, the Moscow terminal used mainly for domestic flights, and then drop out of the sky into a nearby forest.
A series of explosions followed, and a huge plume of smoke was still rising from the burning plane a couple of hours after the crash, which occurred at 3.25 p.m. (1125 GMT).
"The Ilyushin 86 plane that crashed was carrying 16 people on board - four flight crew and 12 air stewards," said an Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman.
The 60-metre-long Il-86 is Russia's main long-distance airliner, and the first wide-body commercial aircraft built in the former Soviet Union. It is comparable in size to the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Airbus A300.
Some 120 Il-86 planes are in use in the former Soviet Union, mostly on high-density routes and charter flights.
It can fly at up to 860 kph for 6,400 kilometres before refuelling.