Plane crash in Ukraine: 26 dead, engine failure mentioned

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Twenty-six people, mostly students at a military school, were killed in a military transport plane crash on Friday during a training flight in eastern Ukraine, according to a last review.

“Ukraine has lost 26 of its sons,” President Volodymyr Zelensky, who visited the site, declared Saturday on Facebook, declaring a day of national mourning on Saturday.

The previous report reported 23 dead and two missing. In total, the plane was carrying 27 people, seven crew members and 20 students of the Kharkiv (eastern) National Aviation University.

Two students survived the disaster, but one of them, in “extremely serious” condition, died Saturday morning, according to the Minister of Health.

The second injured suffers from a concussion, but his life is not in danger, we learned from a hospital source.

“It is difficult to find the words to express the pain of this loss,” President Zelensky added on Facebook, saying that an investigation was underway to quickly establish the causes of the accident.

The plane, an Antonov-26, crashed Friday evening during a training flight two kilometers from the Chugouiv military airport, near Kharkiv.

According to preliminary information, the commander of the crew flying the aircraft reported a failure of one of the engines seven minutes before the crash and asked to be able to land urgently, said in a statement. Ukrainian security (SBU).

The students were not involved in the piloting, added the SBU.

The Minister of Defense, Andriï Taran, affirmed that “the plane in all likelihood touched the ground with its wing”, according to a press release from his ministry.

The aircraft had been built in 1977, but could still fly three years without renovations, assured the minister.

Several messages of condolence have been sent since Friday by foreign leaders, including Polish President Andrzej Duda, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and European Union Foreign Minister Josep Borrell.

The city of Tchougouïv has 30,000 inhabitants and is located about thirty kilometers south-east of Kharkiv. It is also about a hundred kilometers west of the front line which separates the territories which are under the control of the Ukrainian government from those which are in the hands of pro-Russian separatists.

The Antonov An-26 is a light transport aircraft designed in Ukraine during Soviet times. 24 meters long, it can fly at a cruising speed of 440 km / h.

Several military planes have crashed in Ukraine during training flights in recent years.

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