A passenger plane has crashed in Russia’s far east after disappearing from radar, with 49 people on board feared dead, local officials have said.
The flight, operated by Siberia-based Angara Airlines, vanished from radar on Thursday and lost contact with air traffic controllers while approaching its destination of Tynda, a remote town in the Amur region bordering China.
An aerial inspection of the Soviet-era An-24 plane crash site found no survivors, the local emergency services told the state news agency, Tass. “According to preliminary information, all onboard were killed. So far, the rescue helicopter has been unable to land at the crash site,” an unnamed emergency official said.
Parts of the burning wreckage were discovered about 9 miles from Tynda airport on a mountainside, authorities said.
Russian media published footage showing thick smoke rising above a dense forest at what was thought to be the crash site.
The regional governor, Vasily Orlov, said that according to preliminary data, 43 passengers, including five children, and six crew members were onboard. “All necessary forces and means have been deployed to search for the plane,” he wrote on Telegram.
Malfunction and human error were being considered as causes of the crash, the country’s transport investigative committee said.
The An-24 is a twin turboprop regional aircraft designed by the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau in the late 1950s. Known for its ruggedness and ability to operate from unpaved runways, it was widely used in remote regions of Russia and central Asia. The Angara plane that crashed was built in 1976, making it nearly 50 years old, according to aircraft data.
The crash on Thursday of the An‑24 in the Amur region marks Russia’s first fatal passenger aviation incident since July 2021, when a Petropavlovsk‑Kamchatsky An‑26 went down near Palana, killing all 28 people onboard.
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But Russia has seen a rise in non-fatal mechanical failures on passenger planes since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as western sanctions have damaged its aviation industry, with dozens of foreign jets seized and access to vital spare parts cut off.
Russia has struggled to replace both its outdated Soviet-era fleet and its modern western aircraft such as Boeing and Airbus with domestically produced alternatives.
In 2023, representatives of several regional airlines appealed for an extension of the An-24’s service life, citing difficulties replacing the ageing aircraft because of sanctions.
An analysis by the Russian independent outlet Agentstvo shows that the aircraft had experienced at least two technical malfunctions since 2022. In May 2022, the generator failed mid-flight, and in March this year, the crew was forced to request a return to the parking area owing to radio communication issues during a flight from Irkutsk to Kirensk.