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Boeing plane crashes in Russia (55 aboard reported dead)

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SteveO409

Did you know Halo invented the FPS?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/18/europe/russia-plane-crash/index.html

(CNN)A Boeing 737 passenger jet crashed as it was landing at the Rostov-on-Don airport in southern Russia, the country's Southern Regional Emergency Center said Saturday.

All people on board have died, Russian state news agency Tass reported, citing an official at the emergency center.

Flydubai Flight 981 had traveled from Dubai to Rostov-on-Don with 55 people aboard, the emergency center said.

Flight radar route of #FZ981 that crashed on landing
yYpKFg8.jpg

http://flightradar24.com/data/flights/fz981/#922b3bd

Just tragic :(
 
If they crashed while landing, that flight pattern could have been them just in a holding pattern waiting for weather to clear up before making their approach.
 
Just fyi, I feel it would be more useful to put the airline and flight number in the title rather than the original plane manufacturer.

Anyway, this is unfortunate. Hopefully it can be discovered what went wrong so everyone can learn. And yeah that is an erratic looking flight pattern if it is true.
 
Planes are supposed to go in holding patterns if air traffic control tells them to wait for a landing but that does look like a mess. The first loop looks like what a textbook holding pattern should be.
 

antonz

Member
The footage of the crash is very odd. It doesn't match the story of a plane missing the runway. It looks like its on fire and it comes in at an angle like a missile hitting a target.
 

Kud Dukan

Member
The footage of the crash is very odd. It doesn't match the story of a plane missing the runway. It looks like its on fire and it comes in at an angle like a missile hitting a target.

Yeah, that doesn't look like a plane crashing on a landing attempt to me.
 

Paracelsus

Member
RIP. Must've been excruciating because it doesn't look one of those movie-like "emergency landings ending in tragedy", they struck like a missile.
 
It looks like the plane was in a holding pattern due to the poor weather around the airport. If I had to guess the weather was probably a major contributing factor in the crash.
 

cameron

Member
55 passengers. 6 crew. Death toll is 61.
“A Boeing 737 crashed as it was coming into land. There were 61 people on board. They are all dead,” said a spokesman from the local ministry, quoted by the official TASS news agency.

There were 55 passengers and six crew members on the plane, the official added.

The accident happened at 0050 GMT, according to an official statement from the emergencies ministry.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...s-on-landing-in-russian-city-of-rostov-on-don

Tragic as always. RIP.
 

Mohonky

Member
Yea this seems like they were waiting for clearance to land, bad weather maybe?
Without having any altitude data on that, it could have been anything from holding pattern to systems checks to Some failure leading to i usual flight behaviour.

Sure came down hard though, that wasn't anything even remotely approaching a landing descent, it just slammed into the ground.

I reckon they might have problems in the flight and were circling the airport to diagnose the issue and find out what was or wasn't working before attempting a landing.
 

MikeDown

Banned
great, just what I wanted to hear before flying next week. This is so sad and scary. Tragic, RIP. Most scary thing is knowing there is nothing you can do if something goes wrong in the air.
 

dejay

Banned
Without having any altitude data on that, it could have been anything from holding pattern to systems checks to Some failure leading to i usual flight behaviour.

The blue is high altitude, green is low from what I can gather. Pilot took a pass, didn't land, got directed into a landing pattern again and crashed on the second attempt.

Maybe something as simple as a stall caused by an inexperienced pilot, similar to the San Francisco tail slam a couple of years ago, only worse. Or any number of system failures or icing.
 

rrc1594

Member
great, just what I wanted to hear before flying next week. This is so sad and scary. Tragic, RIP. Most scary thing is knowing there is nothing you can do if something goes wrong in the air.

I'm flying to see my mom next week, something I didn't want to see
 

cameron

Member
Another plane made three landing attempts before diverting. Could be weather.

Edit:
Vasily Golubev, the governor of the Rostov region some 950 kilometers (600 miles) south of Moscow, was quoted by Russian news agencies as telling local journalists that the plane crashed about 250 meters (800 feet) short of the runway. News reports said the plane caught fire after the crash.

The cause of the crash was not immediately determined, but Golubev said: "By all appearances, the cause of the air crash was the strongly gusting wind, approaching a hurricane level."

State news agency Tass said weather data from the area indicated that winds were anywhere from 14 to 22 meters per second (30-50 miles per hour) at the time of the crash and that there was light rain.

Ian Petchenik, a spokesman for the flight-tracking website Flightradar24, told The Associated Press that the plane missed approach then entered a holding pattern and tried to land again before contact was lost.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/abc6.../russia-says-airline-dubai-crashes-rostov-don
 

Oriel

Member
The Russian aviation industry has a terrible safety record so events like these really don't surprise me that much. Let's just hope the Kremlin doesn't try and brush this under the carpet like everything else in the RF.

RIP to all concerned.
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
RIP.

If the weather was so bad that the plane had to circle for 2 hours (I heard this on BBC) I wonder why wasn't it diverted to another airport. Or after the first failed attempt (although at that point it might not have had enough fuel anymore). Who's call was that?

Seems very likely to be caused by icing or strong downward currents close to the airport. Especially in a storm.
 
After watching the video and seeing it drop like a lead balloon I thought 'that doesn't look like a landing attempt' but then seeing that there were near-hurricane winds I think I can understand now why it dropped like it seems to have.
 
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