Russian Jet Crashes in Bad Weather; 170 Killed

A Russian airliner carrying at least 170 passengers and crew members crashed Tuesday in Ukraine on a flight from a Black Sea resort to St. Petersburg, killing all on board, authorities said.

The Pulkovo Airlines jetliner crashed midafternoon during a heavy thunderstorm, apparently while trying to make an emergency landing.

The crew had broadcast a distress signal at more than 30,000 feet of altitude and another after dropping to 10,000 feet, authorities said.

The death toll included 45 children and teenagers, the Russian news agency Interfax reported, citing a spokesman at Anapa airport, where the flight began. Some reports put the number on board the Tupolev-154 aircraft at 171.

The cause of the crash was unclear, with authorities in Russia and Ukraine issuing conflicting statements throughout the afternoon and evening. Some claimed that there had been a fire on board. Others said that there was no evidence of a fire and that lightning had probably caused the crash.

Russian Emergency Situations Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andriyanova emphasized that authorities did not believe the crash was an incident of terrorism.

“A terrorist attack is ruled out,” she said, in comments reported by the RIA Novosti news agency. “Ukrainian sources said the plane was caught in a thunderstorm.”

The crash occurred during an exceptionally heavy thunderstorm, but bad weather did not necessarily explain why the crew issued the initial distress signals when the craft was at a high cruising altitude.

It was also unclear whether reports of a fire on board originated with communications from the crew or from witnesses saying that the plane was on fire before it crashed near the city of Donetsk, about 370 miles southeast of Kiev.

Ukrainian Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Igor Krol said that a fire broke out on the plane at 32,800 feet and that the crew decided to try to make an emergency landing, Interfax reported Tuesday afternoon.

But Tuesday evening, Anatoly Medved, the ministry’s deputy head, had attributed reports of a fire to witnesses on the ground.

“According to the witnesses living in the villages around the place where the plane went down, it caught fire in the air and attempted a belly landing,” Medved said, in remarks reported by Interfax.

Nikolay Grimaylo, a cow herder from the village of Sukha Balka, about half a mile from the crash site, said in a telephone interview that he and another man were taking shelter under a tree during a thunderstorm while watching over a herd of cattle. That’s when he became aware of the stricken airplane.

“I don’t recall such a powerful thunderstorm in my life,” he said. “Lightning bolts were hitting the ground very close to where we were and the sound of thunder was deafening. The clouds were very low and very dark. It was in the middle of the afternoon but it was very dark, like late in the evening. Even the cows were terrified.”

Then the men heard another noise, “not like thunder, but it was like rumbling and booming, and it was getting closer and closer.”

“We stood up and looked overhead and saw a huge plane flying very low and very close,” Grimaylo said. “At first it was turning kind of right, then left, then right again, lower and lower. Then it reached the place in the field where the ravine begins and fell right behind the slope.

“The sound was deafening, as if a bomb exploded,” he said. “A burst of fire came up immediately and then thick black smoke was suddenly everywhere. The lightning bolts kept hitting the ground around us. But we turned and ran with the cows toward the village.”

Grimaylo said he told villagers about the crash and locked up the cattle in a barn before returning to the scene to find firefighters already on hand.

“There was no fire ... but the wreckage was still smoldering,” he said. “It was so utterly wrecked that it was almost all flat and black.”

“A fireman told me to go home. ‘There is nothing you can do here,’ he said to me. ‘No one survived.’ ”

While post-Soviet airlines had a bad safety record in the 1990s, Russian airlines and airports showed a better safety performance until recently.

At least 122 people died last month when an Airbus A-310 belonging to the Russian company S7, previously known as Sibir Airlines, veered off the runway on landing in the Siberian city of Irkutsk and burst into flames.

In May, 113 people died when an Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia crashed into the Black Sea while trying to land in the Russian resort of Sochi during bad weather.

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Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.