Russian Emergency Ministry employees sift through the wreckage of a Dubai airliner that crashed at the Rostov-on-Don airport. (AP)
Moscow — An airliner carrying 61 people from Dubai crashed early yesterday while landing in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don in strong winds, killing all aboard, Russian officials said.
All 55 passengers and six crew members had died, Igor Oder, head of the Emergencies Ministry’s southern regional operations, said in a televised briefing.
The Boeing 737-800 belonged to the budget carrier FlyDubai.
In a statement, FlyDubai confirmed that flight FZ981 crashed on landing and said that there are fatalities.
“We are doing all we can to gather information as quickly as possible. At this moment our thoughts and prayers are with our passengers and our crew who were on board the aircraft,” the airline said.
Vasily Golubev, the governor of the Rostov region some 950 kilometers south of Moscow, was quoted by Russian news agencies as telling local journalists that the plane crashed about 250 meters 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 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.
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