Plane crash underscores Russia’s poor safety record, regional problems | Aviation News

According to experts, the plane crash on the Russian Kamchatka Peninsula is breaking the national aircraft safety record and the problem of its huge Far East region is much bigger.

22 passengers and six crew members, including two children, were aboard an An-28 plane in northwestern Kamochka on a Russian volcano-filled peninsula on a rocky and foggy cliff overlooking the Okhotsk Sea.

Most of the bodies have been fished from cold waters.

Rescue workers continue to comb the 20-square-kilometer area to search for debris and the flight record of the plane, the Ministry of Emergencies said.

There are no official conclusions as to what caused the accident on Tuesday, but the Russian prosecutor said the possible reasons could be the pilot’s fault, bad weather or a technical problem.

The incident indicates that it is a bigger problem for small airlines that make decades of aircraft that ensure aircraft accuracy, such as instrument landing systems, which ensure flight accuracy.

Newer equipment would increase the availability of each airport in bad weather – something known as a “meteorological minimum” on the plane.

“This will allow for increased meteorological minimums when safe take-offs and landings are possible,” said Al Jazeera Oleg Panteleev, a Moscow expert with Infomost Consulting.

Russia also has one of the worst security records in the world.

The Interstate Aviation Commission, a group that oversees air safety regulations in post-Soviet states, said in a 2018 report that pilot errors cause 75 percent of plane crashes and other accidents in Russia and other regular USSR states.

Some of the most deadly recent accidents in Russia are in December 2016 tragedyA military plane crashed into the Black Sea after taking off from Sochi International Airport, killing 92 people – including 64 members of an army choir on their way to Syria to support Russian troops.

In November 2013, a Boeing-737 of the Russian company Tatarstan crashed in the city of Kazan in the Volga region, killing 50 passengers and crew.

In April 2010, 96 people aboard a Tupolev-154 Polish Air Force plane were killed in an accident near the Russian city of Smolensk on a plane carrying the Polish president and senior Polish officials.

“Every year there is a big accident with the corpses,” Mikhail Barabanov, a Moscow resident center analyst at the Center for Analysis and Technology Analysis, said in a Facebook post in 2019 after the emergency landing. An Aeroflot SSJ-100 plane in Moscow killed 41 people.

The dying region

In Kamchatka, planes are the only reliable way to move around the region, a UK-sized peninsula with a population of just 320,000.

The mountainous terrain of Kamchatka, the many rivers and the Siberian climate make it impossible to build asphalt roads.

“There are no roads and no land [transport] infrastructure, however, is minimal in coastal areas, ”Moscow air security expert Roman Gusarov told Al Jazeera.

“That’s why they use small aircraft in the region, especially turboprops, with airstrips capable of landing at small airports,” he said.

These airlines are key to Russia, the world’s largest nation on earth, where permafrosts and long distances make roads reliable and impassable.

Kamchatka demonstrates these conditions in Russia, and the reason for the eastern part of the 143 million nation to deal with catastrophic depopulation.

In the north of the peninsula, “in principle, there are no roads,” said Natalia Sushko.

He was born 62 years ago in the south of the peninsula, but left the “continent”, as mainland Russia is called there, in 2013.

“Kamchatka can’t be imagined beautiful, but that’s it. It lasts two to three months in the summer, but the rest of the year is rain, humidity, cold, wind and gusts of snow, ”said Sushko, who now lives in a Moscow suburb.

Its departure from Kamchatka and Russia is part of the rest of the massive exodus from the Far East, a large part of Northeast Asia, bordering Alaska, China, North Korea and Japan, and two-fifths of Russian territory.

That’s slightly more than all of Australia, but the region’s population is just 8.2 million. And that’s 20% less than the fall of the Soviets.

Despite promising free land and other benefits, people are still leaving the crowd by 2050, demographers say, with less than four million people living.

All kinds of planes and helicopters played a key role in the Soviet Union’s efforts to develop a region with many resources.

Communist Moscow developed a network of aircraft that would transport people, food, drugs, medical equipment, and herbs.

“We flew the grass to the Far North so that the children could drink milk,” Vitali Shelkovnikov, head of the Moscow Flight Safety Advisory Agency, told Al Jazeera.

The cows that ate the grass were blind for months of Arctic nights, but their milk was still good for the kids, he said.

Official response

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed condolences to the bereaved families, and the regional governor pledged compensation of up to $ 5,000.

“We will do everything we can to help [you] survive this tragedy, ”Vladimir Solodov told relatives of the victims in the town of Palana.

Some locals, however, believe the tragedy could have been avoided – a similar plane crashed into the same rock nine years ago.

In 2012, another An-28 collided with the rock Pyatibratka (Of Five Brothers) on a ship with 14 people. Only four passengers survived, and an orthodox wooden cross with the names of the dead marks the site of the collision.

The natives undertook to blow up the rock or change the route of the planes that had landed in Palana. Aviation officials accepted the idea, according to the local Kamchatka Info publication.

But the authorities did not respond. “They didn’t even care to answer,” a local resident told Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity.