WORLD / EUROPE
An-26 aircraft had 28 on board, search focused on sea
Plane lost in Russia’s Far East
Published: Jul 06, 2021 07:28 PM
Medical workers carry a patient suspected of having coronavirus on a stretcher at a hospital in Kommunarka, outside Moscow, Russia, Saturday. The Russian coronavirus task force said 619 people died over the past day, the most since December 24. Photo: VCG

Medical workers carry a patient suspected of having coronavirus on a stretcher at a hospital in Kommunarka, outside Moscow, Russia, Saturday. The Russian coronavirus task force said 619 people died over the past day, the most since December 24. Photo: VCG

Contact has been lost with a passenger plane carrying more than two dozen people in Russia's remote Far Eastern peninsula of Kamchatka, local officials said Tuesday.

The An-26 was flying from Kamchatka's main city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to the coastal town of Palana when it disappeared and failed to land as scheduled, Valentina Glazova, a spokeswoman for the local transport prosecutor's office, told AFP. 

She said 29 people were on board, including 23 passengers and six crew. She later confirmed the number of passengers as 22. 

"Search and rescue efforts are underway," she said. "All that is known at this time, what has been possible to establish, is that communication with the plane was interrupted and it did not land." 

She said the plane had been operated by a local aviation company in Kamchatka, a vast peninsula on Russia's Pacific coast popular with adventure tourists for its abundant wildlife and live volcanoes. 

Russian news agencies quoted local officials as saying most of the passengers were from Palana - population of about 3,000 people - including four local government officials and the town's head Olga Mokhiryova.

Kamchatka's government published a list of 28 people who were on board the plane, including Mokhiryova and one child born in 2014. 

It said that communication with the plane had been lost 9 kilometers from Palana's airport.  

Citing emergency ministry sources, news agencies reported that a search for the plane was underway with a radius of 15-25 kilometers around the airport, with a focus on the Okhotsk Sea.

"There is objective evidence that the plane crashed and fell into the sea," a source told news agency TASS. 

The Kamchatka government said the peninsula has five An-26 planes servicing its remote points. The regional transport ministry and the local aviation company said the plane was in good condition and had passed safety checks. 

An-26 planes, which were manufactured from 1969 until 1986 during the Soviet era and are still used throughout the former USSR for civilian and military transport, have been involved in a number of accidents in recent years. 

An-26s have also been involved in Russian military accidents in recent years.