Wreckage of missing Russian passenger plane found

The wreckage of the passenger plane with 28 people aboard that disappeared in Russia’s Far Eastern Kamchatka peninsula on Tuesday morning has been found, the country’s aviation agency told AFP.

“Rescuers found the wreckage of the aircraft. Given the geographic features of the landscape, rescue operations are difficult,” the aviation agency said in an emailed statement, AFP reported. The debris was found along the region’s Pacific coast.

The plane was travelling from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, to Palana and went missing somewhere in Kamchatka.  The aircraft was carrying six crew members and 23 passengers, including a child, Russian agency Sputnik quoted a representative of the emergency services as saying. The Russian Emergencies Ministry has dispatched a helicopter and troops for search and rescue operations, the representative added. 

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“All the emergency services were alerted and sent to examine the plane’s route. Two helicopters and a special aircraft are investigating the area. Rescue troops are ready to move from Palana to the aircraft’s detection point,” an official statement from the regional government read. 

Meanwhile, AFP quoted Valentina Glazova, a spokeswoman for the local transport prosecutor’s office, saying, “All that is known at this time, what has been possible to establish, is that communication with the plane was interrupted and it did not land.”

She added that the plane was being operated by a local aviation company in Kamchatka, a vast peninsula region in Russia’s Pacific coast famous for its abundant wildlife and active volcanoes. 

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Local reported claimed that most of the passengers in the plane were from the town of Palana, with population of about 3,000 people, including four local government officials and the town’s head Olga Mokhiryova.

A statement from the Kamchatka government claimed that communication with the plane ceased around 9 kilometres from the Palana airport. 

Rescue efforts were being conducted in a 15-25 kilometrre radius around the airport, with a focus on the Palana sea as well. “There is objective evidence that the plane crashed and fell into the sea,” a source told TASS agency. 

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An-26 planes, which were manufactured from 1969 until 1986 during the Soviet era and are still used throughout the former USSR for civilian and military transport, have been involved in a number of accidents in recent years.

Four people died in March when an An-26 plane used by ex-Soviet Kazakhstan’s military crashed while landing at an airport in the country’s largest city of Almaty.

In September 2020, 26 people died in ex-Soviet Ukraine when a military An-26 plane crashed in the northeastern city of Kharkiv during a training flight.

An-26s have also been involved in Russian military accidents in recent years.