A passenger plane with 34 people on board has landed on a frozen river in Russia’s Far East, apparently because of a mistake by the pilot.
No-one was hurt when the Polar Airlines Soviet-era Antonov An-24 plane came to a halt on Thursday morning not far from land, on the frozen River Kolyma.
The plane landed off the runway of Zyryanka airport.
Initial inquiries said pilot error was to blame, prosecutors said. Thirty passengers and four crew were on board.
I used to build ice runways to do arctic exploration. There’s this equation called Gold’s which goes like: w=4h². W is weight in kg, and h is thickness in cm. A 100cm (39") ice slab will bear 40,000kg – or 88,000lbs.
As you can see, because of the ² in the equation, the load bearing capacity scales quite rapidly once it is thick. In the Canadian Arctic, natural ice was quite often 140cm or more in March. We would land cargo planes on the ice and unload bulldozers and other BS like that haha.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A passenger plane with 34 people on board has landed on a frozen river in Russia’s Far East, apparently because of a mistake by the pilot.
No-one was hurt when the Polar Airlines Soviet-era Antonov An-24 plane came to a halt on Thursday morning not far from land, on the frozen River Kolyma.
Initial inquiries said pilot error was to blame, prosecutors said.
Flight PI217 left Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha republic in Russia’s Far East, early on Thursday.
It was bound for Zyryanka, 1,100km (685 miles) to the north-east, and was due to fly on to another small town in Srednekolymsk before returning to Yakutsk.
Video from one of the passengers showed the plane almost in the centre of the frozen River Kolyma in eastern Siberia.
The original article contains 185 words, the summary contains 128 words. Saved 31%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
U.S. pilot landed on Hudson river. Of course, Russia wants to top this.
China claims historical documents saying that they were the first to do it 50,000 years ago.
I wonder if like, the GPS was jammed? But damn, seriously? Something that heavy on a lake, albeit frozen still, seems nuts.
He should get a book deal like Sully Sullenberger
To be fair to the pilot, the “airport” runway appears to be a dirt strip along the river. They probably missed it by a few dozen meters.
