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DIY rescue after plane crash
19/03/2007 14:52 - (SA)
Moscow - Survivors of a Russian plane crash cut fellow passengers out of their seatbelts as they hung upside down in the smouldering fuselage, Russian newspapers quoted eyewitnesses as saying on Monday.
Six people were killed when the Tu-134 airliner with 57
people on board crash-landed in heavy fog and flipped over on
Saturday near the Volga river city of Samara. The front section
of the fuselage broke off in the impact.
Survivors said it was a miracle the death toll was not
higher. They said passengers and crew had to rescue themselves
from the wreckage because airport emergency services were slow
to reach the crash scene.
"The rescuers took 20 minutes to get to us. I know it was
foggy but we were right there on the runway," Komosomolskaya
Pravda newspaper quoted passenger Vadim Titlov as saying.
"We dragged our neighbours out (of the plane). We went
through the cabin looking for a knife to cut the seatbelts."
He said because there were no firefighters immediately in
sight, passengers used their hands to heap snow onto a fire that
broke out at the spot where the port wing had broken away from
the fuselage.
"We did everything ourselves," said passenger Andrei
Beglitsin. "We put out the fire as best we could, and we rescued
people from the plane."
Another survivor, Oleg Nosenko, was sitting at the front of
the aircraft and escaped through the gaping hole where the nose
had snapped off. "I lost consciousness and then came to when
someone was shoving me and saying: 'Get out, quick!'" he told
Komsomolskaya Pravda.
The flight data recorders, or "black boxes", have been flown
to Moscow where they will be examined by crash investigators.
Carrier Utair, which owns the crashed jet, said it believed
poor weather caused the crash.
But newspapers quoted a crew member as saying a problem was
logged earlier with one of the aircraft's avionics systems which
helps the pilot line the jet up with the runway on landing.
Aviation authorities have ordered carriers to phase out the
Soviet-designed Tu-134.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin last year ordered an
urgent review of aviation safety after a spate of crashes in
Russia or involving Russian aircraft killed hundreds of people.
- Reuters
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