The Russian pilots who crash-landed a fuel-laden Airbus jet in a corn field, without any serious harm to the 233 people on board, have been hailed as heroes.
The A321 was moments into its flight, after taking off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky airport, when a flock of gulls got sucked into its engines, causing both to fail.
Russians are comparing the drama to “Miracle on the Hudson” – the bird strike that almost doomed an Airbus over New York in 2009, but ended happily when the pilot landed the jet safely in the Hudson River.
It was a regular flight from Moscow to Simferopol, in Crimea, with 226 passengers on board, mostly going on holiday to the seaside.
The Ural Airlines plane weighed as much as 77 tonnes and pilot Damir Yusupov told reporters how narrowly the passengers and seven crew had escaped disaster.
The plane was climbing, accelerating, when first one engine, then the other, suddenly shut down.
When one engine failed they thought they could still turn back to the airport, Capt Yusupov said.
“When we saw that the second was also losing power, despite all of our efforts, the plane began losing height,” he said.
“I changed my mind several times, because I was planning to gain height,” he said. But Flightradar data shows that the A321 had only reached 243m (797ft).
“I planned to reach a certain height, hold it there, figure out the engine failure, make the correct decision, work it all out. But then it turned out there was really hardly any time.”
Captain Yusupov and his co-pilot, Georgi Murzin, managed to stop the fuel supply to the engines and kept the jet level, gliding it down into the corn field, without lowering the undercarriage. With the wheels down, there is a risk of flying debris rupturing the plane’s fuel tanks.
He said he had practiced emergency landings on a flight simulator at Ural Airlines.
“I really don’t feel like a hero,” he said. “I did what I had to do, saved the plane, the passengers, the crew.”
Yuri Sytnik, one of Russia’s top pilots, told the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda: “The crew did everything by the book: shut down the engines… brought the plane down really smoothly, touched down first with the tail section, as required, killed the speed – that’s a very tricky moment: you don’t dip the nose, don’t let an engine hit the ground.”
