A passenger plane with 67 people on board crashed today near the airport Kazakh city of Aktau, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan’s emergency services reported. The aircraft was flying from Baku to Grozny – capital of Chechnya – but had to be diverted due to fog. A spokesman for Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency said the pilot had decided to divert to the coastal city of Aktau after a bird strike on the plane caused “an emergency situation on board.” Other sources assure that the explosion of an oxygen cylinder on board of the aircraft could have been one of the causes of the accident.
At least 28 people – two of them children – who were traveling on the airline plane airline Azerbaijan Airlines They survived the accident and were hospitalized, said Kazakh Health Minister Akmaral Alnazarova. “It was a regular flight. He had to fly to Grozny, but due to fog they sent him to Makhachkala and from there, apparently, to Aktau,” a spokesman for the Chechen capital airport told the TASS agency.
According to Kazakh authorities, the crashed plane is a Embraer 190 belonging to the Azerbajan Airlines company and would have crashed three kilometers from the Aktau landing strip. A fire broke out at the scene of the accident and was put out by firefighters, according to sources from the Kazakh emergency services.
Mobile phone footage circulating on the Internet shows the plane making a steep descent before crashing to the ground and turning into a fireball. There are images in which you can see part of the fuselage torn from the wings and the rest of the plane upside down on the ground.
According to the Interfax agency, the majority of the aircraft’s passengers are Azerbaijanis. According to the crisis office operating at the scene of the tragedy, “the crew sent a distress signal at 08:35 local time (03:35 GMT) and reported a failure in the control system.” “Then at 08:49 they requested an emergency landing in Aktau and tried to do it in direct mode, However, at 09:28 the plane crashed into the ground,” they said.
The official Kazakh news agency Kazinfor reported that there were 105 passengers and 5 crew members on board the plane. “Information about the victims is currently being clarified, but according to preliminary information there are survivors,” the country’s Ministry of Emergency Situations reported. But Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Transport clarified that there were 62 passengers and five crew members on the plane.
What is the crashed plane like?
Azerbaijan Airlines is an airline with aircraft comparable to Western ones. There are none of Russian or Ukrainian construction in its fleet of 32 devices. All of them have been produced by the American company Boeing, the European Airbus, the Franco-Italian ATR and the Brazilian Embraer. The accident plane was a new one and had joined the fleet in 2023.