Shares in Aeroflot fall three per cent after plane crash kills 41 people
Shares in Russia’s largest airline, Aeroflot, fell by more than three per cent after a plane burst into flames in a crash-landing on Sunday at a Moscow airport, killing 41 people.
A Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft carrying 73 passengers and five crew was struck by lightning as it took off towards Murmansk, in Russia’s northwest. Two children were among the bodies recovered from the crash site.
Television footage showed the plane crash and slide along the tarmac at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, before the rear exploded into flames.
Aeroflot’s shares plummeted three per cent on the Moscow exchange, and were down about two per cent yesterday.
Many passengers on board SU 1492 escaped via the plane's emergency slides that inflated after the hard landing.
Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative Committee, said in a statement that only 37 out of 78 people on board had survived. No official cause has been given for the disaster.
The Investigative Committee said it had opened an investigation and was looking into whether the pilots had breached air safety rules. Some passengers blamed bad weather and lightning.
"We took off and then lightning struck the plane," the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr Egorov, as saying.
"The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were so scared, we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped down the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground."
Russia’s Transport Minister Yevgeny Ditrikh said he saw no reason to ground the domestic-made Sukhoi Superjet 100 fleet after the incident.