Sat, November 07, 2009
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) -- Russia's Pacific Fleet military investigation department has opened a criminal case into Friday's military plane crash that presumably killed all 11 crew members on board.
A Tu-142-M3 anti-submarine plane, which was on a combat training mission, crashed in the Tatarsky Strait, about 15-20 km off the Pacific coast on Friday.
The plane from the Russian Pacific Fleet disappeared from the radar screen at 14:15 Moscow time (1115 GMT).
Rescuers had located the wreckage of the plane on Saturday morning in waters at a depth of about 44 meters. The search for the missing crew members was underway, though the chances of finding any survivors were slim.
A special commission was also investigating the cause of the crash, said the Itar-Tass news agency. The RIA Novosti news agency reported citing preliminary data that the crash was caused by a technical failure, while the Interfax news agency said a mechanical fault was probably to blame.
According to a senior source from Russia's Air Force, the life-raft on board the plane as an emergency equipment was not made use of by the crew members, neither did they make radio contact before the aircraft went down.
The source also said any information stored on the plane's black boxes was hardly retrievable if the black boxes were not found within 36 hours of the crash.
This has been the second plane crash that occurred in Russia's Far East within one week. An Ilyushin transport plane of the Interior Ministry crashed minutes after takeoff last Sunday in the far-eastern region of Yakutia, killing all 11 people on board.
