Tragedy In Skies Over Ukraine

I'm starting to think it might not be a bad idea to ground all Russian airlines.

A Russian jet carrying 171 people, including 39 children, to St. Petersburg from a Black Sea resort caught fire in mid-air and crashed northwest of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk Tuesday afternoon, Russian and Ukrainian officials said.

There were no survivors among the 161 passengers and crew of 10, rescue personnel said.
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Officials said they had ruled out terrorism, which downed two Russian commercial flights simultaneously in August 2004.

Eyewitnesses on the ground confirmed the plane did not seem to have suffered a blast.  The flight, which went down in foul weather, was operated by the St. Petersburg regional carrier Pulkovo Airlines.

Russian (and other former Soviet state) airlines' safety records are unenviable, incurring more than 400 deaths in the last 4 months.

The crash was the third major airline disaster in Russia since May. On July 9, an A-310 airbus operated by S7, Russia's second-largest carrier, crashed after it veered off the runway upon landing in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. Of the 204 people on board, 124 were killed. On May 3, a plane operated by the Armenian national carrier, Armavia, crashed as it approached the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi. The cause of that crash, which killed all 113 passengers and crew members, is still under investigation.

While today's tragic event appears to owe at least in part to mother nature, recent years have also brought dozens of terror-related deaths aboard Russian airliners.  The simultaneous bombings almost precisely two years ago of Volga-AviaExpress and Siberia Airlines turned out to be preventable incidents, facilitated in part by the corruption of airport employees and failure to carry out prescribed profiling procedures which in fact were successful in temporarily netting the two trigger women before they boarded the targeted flights, until the airport police captain released them prematurely.

Non-stop commercial flights offer regular service from Russia to New York, Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.

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