All three aboard the aircraft that went down in Russia’s Far East are alive, emergencies services have said
An Antonov An-2 single-engine plane that went missing over Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East on Thursday has been found, and all three aboard survived the crash, emergencies services have said.
The Soviet-designed aircraft, owned by the company Fieravia, signaled that it was conducting an emergency landing four days ago, some 160km from the village of Klyuchi in the eastern part of the peninsula. The plane, which had two crew members and a single passenger aboard, was flying in low clouds and heavy snow.
The extensive operation to track down the An-2 involved several aircraft and six teams of emergency workers on snowmobiles searching on the ground.
"The plane is found. The people are alive,” the regional emergencies minister, Sergey Lebedev, announced in a post on Russia’s VK platform on Sunday. He later published a photo, which captured the aircraft lying upside down in the middle of a snow field.
According to Lebedev, the three survivors were evacuated to the nearby village of Milkovo by a Mi-8 helicopter, which had earlier discovered the An-2.
"I address all pilots: My dear friends, do not fly in fringe weather. It is better to wait,” the minister wrote.
The lives of the survivors are currently out of danger, regional Health Minister Alksandr Gashkov said. One of them bruised his chest, another had bruised his face and the third had suffered an open head injury which required stitches, he relayed.
The plane’s passenger, Andrey Mitasov, told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that the crash happened because icing had occurred on the aircraft during the flight.
The An-2’s initial altitude was 200 meters, but it then quickly dropped to 100, 80 and 10 meters, he recalled. During the emergency landing, the plane hit a large snowdrift with one of its wheels and “flipped over with us inside it,” Mitasov said.
The boxes and bags with cargo fell on the men, who all bumped their heads in the crash. When they were finally able to get out of the aircraft, they saw that there was just snow and ice for kilometers around them. All the survivors could do was switch on the emergency radio beacon and wait for rescuers to arrive, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
One of the pilots, identified only by his name, Dmitry, told the paper that they had “had very little food, but still managed to stretch it out over four days. To survive the night, we dug a hole in the snow to keep us warm. We burned the fuel.”
“We prayed and believed in a miracle... Until we got into the helicopter, we couldn’t believe that we were found. Today, we are celebrating our second birthday,” Dmitry said.
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