The RussAir Tu-134 tried to land just before midnight local time Monday on a motorway two kilometres (a little over a mile) from Petrozavodsk airport in the Karelia region of northern Russia.
But the plane, which was carrying out a flight from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, crashed and caught fire before it approached the airport.
“On July 20, a Tu-134 plane sustained a hard landing. Contact was lost with the pilot at 23:40. The survivors have been sent to Petrozavodsk hospital,” the local branch of the emergencies ministry said in a statement on its website.
The spokesman of The Russian investigative committee Vladimir Markin told Russian news agencies that a criminal probe was being opened into neglect of air transport rules. “According to the latest information, 52 people were on board the plane.
Forty four were killed and eight were injured,” an emergencies ministry official told the RIA Novosti news agency.
The emergencies ministry in Moscow published a list of the passengers on the flight while the local branch of the ministry in Karelia gave a list of the eight people who had surivived.
The cause of the crash was not immediately clear, although the 24-hour news channel Vesti quoted aviation sources as saying that bad weather in the area at the time could have been a factor. Human error was also not ruled out.
Russian media said that it appeared the plane had failed to reach the runway and had carried out a hard landing on the motorway but had been unable to land safely.
A helicopter with psychologists was flying from Saint Petersburg to provide help to the bereaved, the RIA Novosti news agency said.
However it gave few details over the circumstances of the crash and state television also only gave the most minimal of information.
Bodies were strewn over the highway, a source in the aviation industry told the Interfax agency. The aircraft just missed nearby houses when it crashed.
The eight survivors were hospitalised, some in serious condition, emergency situations ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova told RIA Novosti.
The aircraft was on a flight from Moscow to Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Republic of Karelia in Russia’s Far North.
Russia’s aviation industry remains blighted by repeated accidents involving its ageing fleet of planes, with the Soviet-era Tupolev jets having a particularly poor safety record.
