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A passenger plane carrying 49 people has crashed in Russia’s far east and a search for survivors is under way, local officials have said.
The flight, operated by Siberia-based Angara Airlines, vanished from radar on Thursday and lost contact with air traffic controllers while approaching its destination of Tynda, a remote town in the Amur region bordering China.
An aerial inspection of the An-24 plane crash site found no survivors, the local emergency services told the state news agency RIA Novosti. The emergency services added that survivors could still be found during a ground search.
Parts of the burning wreckage were discovered 9 miles (15km) from Tynda airport on a mountainside, authorities said.
Russian media published footage showing thick smoke rising above a dense forest at what was thought to be the crash site.
The regional governor, Vasily Orlov, said according to preliminary data, there were 43 passengers, including five children, and six crew members on board.
“All necessary forces and means have been deployed to search for the plane,” he wrote on Telegram.
Malfunction and human error were being considered as causes of the plane crash in Tynda, the country’s transport investigative committee said.
The An-24 is a twin turboprop regional aircraft designed by the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau in the late 1950s. Known for its ruggedness and ability to operate from unpaved runways, it was widely used in remote regions of Russia and central Asia. The Angara plane that crashed was built in 1976, making it more than 50 years old, according to aircraft data.
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The crash on Thursday of the An‑24 in the Amur region marks Russia’s first fatal passenger aviation incident since July 2021, when a Petropavlovsk‑Kamchatsky Air An‑26 went down near Palana, killing all 28 people onboard.
But Russia has seen a rise in non-fatal mechanical failures on passenger planes since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as western sanctions have crippled the country’s aviation industry, seizing dozens of foreign jets and cutting off access to vital spare parts.
Russia has struggled to replace both its outdated Soviet-era fleet and modern western aircraft like Boeing and Airbus with domestically produced alternatives.
