A Russian aircraft crashed killing 44 people and injuring a further eight after reportedly hitting a power line in bad weather which cut off electricity supply to runway lights.
The RussAir Tu-134 was trying to land at Petrozavodsk airport in the Karelia region of northern Russia yesterday but failed to make the runway. It careered onto a road more than a mile away and broke up in a ball of flames.
The 30 year old aircraft plane, flying from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, was carrying 43 passengers and nine crew. It narrowly missed a nearby residential area.
“The scene is terrible. It’s carnage. It was a miracle that fragments of the fuselage did not hit houses on the edge of the village of Besovets,” a source in the aviation industry told the Interfax news agency.
The Karelia region lies close to the border with Finland and is popular with Russian tourists for the summer holidays.