A Tu-134 plane carrying Russia's naval chief crash-landed in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula yesterday, officials said. No one was killed, but three officers suffered burns.

 

A navy statement said that an engine failed on the plane carrying Admiral Vladimir Masorin while it was taking off from the airport in the Crimean city of Simferopol, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing. The landing speed was too high and the twin-engine plane rolled off a runway and broke into pieces, the navy said.

 

It said three officers were hospitalized but their lives were not in danger.

 

The navy said the cause of the accident was being investigated and a possible reason could be a bird getting sucked into the engine. It was not immediately known how many people were aboard the plane.

 

Masorin was on an inspection trip to the Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Crimea.

 

Earlier yesterday, an Airbus A310 operated by the Russian S7 airline en route from Turkey to Moscow made an emergency landing in Simferopol after suffering a technical malfunction. In another incident yesterday, a Tu-154 airliner made a successful emergency landing in the Siberian city of Irkutsk after one of its three engines failed.

 

The accidents came a day after an Airbus A310 airliner operated by S7 skidded off a rain-slicked runway, slammed into adjacent garages and burst into flames in Irkutsk, killing at least 124 of the 203 people on board and leaving four others missing. Preliminary data gathered by the commission investigating the crash indicated that the braking system on the plane had failed.

 

Chinese passengers identified

 

Among the missing were two female Chinese passengers from northeast China's Liaoning and Heilongjiang provinces.

 

An official with the Chinese Consulate-General in Khabarovsk of Russia confirmed the identification of the two, saying one is a student in her twenties and the other a businesswoman in her thirties.

 

Wang Tiecheng, another Chinese national who survived the accident and suffered minor injuries, is now staying with his relatives in Irkutsk.

 

Wang, from north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, is a businessman in Moscow and went to Irkutsk to visit his relatives.

 

(China Daily July 11, 2006)