Incident of the week #12

Sometimes a flight tragically ends after only 40 seconds..

This happened this week on an UTAir ATR-72 flight from Tyumen to Surgut (Russia) with 39 passengers and 4 crew. After take-off, the aircraft had just climbed to a maximum altitude of 210 meters (688 feet), when it suddenly banked 35 degrees to the right, followed by a bank to the left, that reached more than 50 degrees at impact with the ground, first with the left wing followed by the left engine, breaking the aircraft into three parts - the plane crashed into snow covered ground and burst into flames just about 2,5 km (1,6 miles) from the runway. All 4 crew and 27 passengers died on the crash. 12 passengers survived and were taken to an hospital by helicopter, where three of them are still in critical conditions. An investigation has now been open. Both cockpit and flight data recorders were successfully recovered. The MAK (Russia´s Interstate Aviation Investigation) reported the black boxes have been successfully read out and first analysis showed that both engines were working until impact with the ground.

What´s now also known is that that due to environmental conditions the aircraft was to be de-iced before departure, ground staff however did not perform de-icing and the flight crew did not insist on de-icing being done to the aircraft.
Another factor that might have contributed for this incident, was the probably lack of experience from the flight crew - mind you: the captain was only 27 years old (with only 2,500 flight hours) and his first officer had just came out from flight school.
Nevertheless, I hope the investigation will be properly carried out in order to find out what really happened so we can all learn something about this tragedy that took so many lives away. And also hope that all the 12 survivors will recover soon.