Passengers of a small plane who were filming their takeoff from an airfield in Magadan were horrified when they realized their aircraft wouldn't make it. It crashed instead but, luckily, no lives were lost in the incident.
The video, purportedly shot from inside an Antonov An-2 plane, which crashed on Thursday in northern Russia, shows the aircraft trying to climb just after takeoff. Its speed seems slow and, at one moment, it virtually stops in the air, loses all lift and starts falling as a horrified groan is heard from passengers.
The plane was about 10 meters in the air when the incident happened. All 12 passengers and two crew members survived the fall, but seven of them were injured. Thankfully, none of the injuries is life-threatening.
Images of the crash site released by investigators in the Magadan region, where the incident happened, shows the damage that the aircraft sustained. Its left wing broke and the nose propeller got heavily bent.
The An-2 is a small, single-engine biplane with more than seven decades of service. Dubbed ‘Kukuruznik’ (crop-duster in English), it has remarkable ability to use unprepared fields for take off and landing. As its nickname suggests, it was widely used in agriculture, as well as a small transport vehicle, a trainer plane and in other areas. It has not been produced in Russia since the 1990s, but hundreds of units remain in operation today.
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