The tail of the doomed plane that crashed in Kazakhstan — leaving 12 people dead and dozens injured — touched the runway twice during takeoff, indicating that it struggled to gain altitude, the country’s deputy prime minister said.
Flight Z2100, a Fokker 100 plane operated by Kazakh budget carrier Bek Air, was scheduled to fly from Almaty, the country’s largest city, to the capital Nur-Sultan when it crashed seconds after takeoff.
Authorities are looking at whether pilot error or technical failure were factors in the crash, Deputy Prime Minister Roman Sklyar said at a press conference in Almaty.
“Most of the passengers who died were in the front part,” he said, adding that the airport was “in an ideal condition” at the time of the crash.
The plane “lost altitude after takeoff and broke through a concrete fence,” before hitting a two-story building about 7:20 a.m., local time Friday, according to the Almaty airport authority.
The country’s emergencies committee released a list of 12 people who died, revising down earlier tolls. Officials said 53 people were injured, including nine children, adding that 10 adults were in critical condition.
Among the dead were the captain, Marat Muratbayev, as well as Rustam Kaidarov, a 79-year-old retired general and 35-year-old Dana Kruglova, a journalist from the private Informburo news agency, according to Agence France-Presse.
Informburo said Kruglova “had wanted to celebrate the New Year with her parents in Nur-Sultan and decided to take this flight”.
A well-known entrepreneur, Aslan Nazaraliyev, posted on Facebook that he had survived right next to where the plane had split into two. “Thanks to Allah, I am alive and well,” Nazaraliyev wrote.
“At first the left wing jolted really hard, then the right. The plane continued to gain altitude, shaking quite severely, and then went down,” Nazaraliyev told The Associated Press by phone.
A survivor told news website Tengrinews that she heard a “terrifying sound” before the aircraft started losing altitude.
“The plane was flying at a tilt. Everything was like in a movie: screaming, shouting, people crying,” she said, according to Reuters.
Government officials said the plane underwent deicing before the flight, but Nazaraliyev recalled that the wings were covered in ice, and that passengers who used emergency exits over the wings slipped and fell.
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev pledged to provide families of the victims with compensation and said that those responsible “will be severely punished in accordance with the law.”
Meanwhile, all Bek Air and Fokker 100 flights in Kazakhstan were suspended pending the investigation, authorities said.
In 2009, all Kazakh airlines except the flagship carrier Air Astana were banned from operating in the European Union because they didn’t meet international safety standards. The ban was lifted only in 2016.
The twin-turbofan Fokker 100 that crashed Friday was reported to be 23 years old and was most recently certified to operate in May.
The company manufacturing the plane went bankrupt in 1996 and the production of the Fokker 100 stopped the following year.
On March 27, 2016, a Bek Air flight carrying 116 passengers and five crew members from Kazakhstan’s Kzyl-Orda airport made an emergency landing at Astana airport, according to the Aviation Safety Network, a website run by the nonprofit Flight Safety Foundation. There were no injuries or fatalities.
With Post wires
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vbnlwb3N0LmNvbS8yMDE5LzEyLzI3L2Rvb21lZC1wYXNzZW5nZXItamV0LXN0cnVnZ2xlZC10by10YWtlLW9mZi1iZWZvcmUtZmF0YWwtY3Jhc2gtaW4ta2F6YWtoc3Rhbi_SAW5odHRwczovL255cG9zdC5jb20vMjAxOS8xMi8yNy9kb29tZWQtcGFzc2VuZ2VyLWpldC1zdHJ1Z2dsZWQtdG8tdGFrZS1vZmYtYmVmb3JlLWZhdGFsLWNyYXNoLWluLWthemFraHN0YW4vYW1wLw?oc=5
2019-12-27 13:22:00Z
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