Team News Riveting
Aktau, December 25
An Embraer passenger plane flying from Azerbaijan to Russia crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday with 62 passengers and five crew on board.
The Kazakh authorities announced that 32 people miraculously survived. The Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 had diverted and flown hundreds of miles off its scheduled route to crash on the opposite shore of the Caspian Sea.
The Russian aviation authorities said there was an emergency that may have been caused by a bird strike. Officials did not immediately explain why it had crossed the sea, but the crash came shortly after drone strikes hit southern Russia. Drone activity has shut airports in the area in the past.
The video footage of the crash showed the plane descending rapidly before bursting into flames as it hit the seashore. The thick black smoke started billowing in the air. Bloodied and bruised passengers were seen stumbling from a piece of the fuselage that had remained intact.
Kazakhstan’s emergency ministry said in a statement that fire services had put out the blaze and that the survivors, including two children, were being treated at a nearby hospital. The bodies of the victims were being recovered.
Azerbaijan Airlines said the Embraer 190 jet was flying from Baku to Grozny, capital of the Chechnya region in southern Russia, but had been forced to make an emergency landing around 3 kilometres from Aktau in Kazakhstan.
“Preliminary: after a collision with birds, due to an emergency situation on board, its commander decided to ‘go’ to an alternate airfield – Aktau was chosen,” Russia’s aviation watchdog said on Telegram.
