Russian pilots succeeded the impossible on Thursday by making a spectacular emergency landing of their Airbus A321 in a cornfield with 233 people on board, after hitting a flock of birds.
In the early morning, the Russian airline Ural Airlines aircraft took off from Zhukovsky airport in the Moscow suburbs for Simferopol, the capital of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
But on takeoff, the aircraft with 226 passengers and 7 crew members “hit a flock of seagulls”, several of which found their way into the Airbus engines causing “major disruptions in their operation”, according to the Federal Aviation Agency Rosaviatsia.
The aircraft crew then decided to make an emergency landing “in a cornfield (…) located more than one kilometer from the take-off runway, without landing gear”, the agency explained, pointing out that “no fire broke out on board”.
The incident injured 23 people, including 9 children, according to the Russian Ministry of Health. Twenty-two of them received medical assistance before being sent home, while a 69-year-old woman was hospitalized, the ministry said in a statement.
“Thanks to the professionalism of the crew and their coordinated actions, the landing did not lead to any tragic consequences,” said Ural Airlines, an airline based in Ekaterinburg, Ural.
#Russia: A-321 of Ural airlines crashlanded near Zhukovskiy of Moscow region after bird strike. 10 wounded. Piliots managed to land a plane in the field https://t.co/r2XoFs37Wt pic.twitter.com/JHRpOOtH9g
— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) August 15, 2019
“Heroic act”
“The crew of the Urals company has demonstrated fantastic know-how and self-control,” said Instagram, the governor of the region where the company is based, Yevgeny Kurovachev. Yekaterinburg captain Damir Yusupov and his team “saved 233 lives. They are heroes,” he said.
“In this very difficult situation, the pilots made the right decisions. Undoubtedly, it is a heroic act,” Nikolai Tsoukanov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s representative in the Urals, said in a statement.
The pilots were thanked in many social network messages sent by the plane’s passengers.
“I am grateful to the pilots as much as to God, because we landed and we didn’t crash,” wrote one of them on Twitter.
“Everyone is alive! The pilot is a genius,” Komsomolskaya pravda another passenger, Olga, told the popular daily newspaper, saying that the successful emergency landing had been greeted with “applause”.
Svetlana Babina, also on board during the landing, assured the Ria Novosti agency that she had heard “a strange noise in the engine” just after takeoff. “But we have to do the pilot justice, because in this situation, the landing was as smooth as possible,” he adds.
The crew “helped to evacuate, cared entirely about our lives. It seems to me that thanks to this, everything turned out well for us,” Ekaterina Svetchnikova, another passenger on the A321, told Ria Novosti.
An investigation was opened after this incident and a special commission of the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee (MAK), responsible for investigating air accidents in Russia, was set up to study the circumstances.
In May, the fire of a Sukhoi Superjet 100 after its emergency landing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport killed 41 people. The investigators pointed to the deactivation of the autopilot by lightning and probable pilot errors that led to the tragedy.
