FINAL UPDATE: Charter Plane Carrying KHL's Lokomotiv Crashes
No confirmation on who was on-board, but the roster includes former NHLers Pavol Demitra, Karel Rachunek, Ruslan Salei, Karlis Skrastins, Josef Vasicek, and Alexander Korolyuk. They were coached by former NHLer Brad McCrimmon, along with assistant coaches Igor Korolev and Alexander Karpovtsev. Regardless, horrible news for a terrible summer.
FINAL UPDATE: Bruce Peter over at Puck Worlds has the complete list of deceased and survivors, reported and confirmed. Our best wishes to their loved ones.
9 months ago
Bettman's Nightmare
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I don’t know if you guys know this, but McCrimmon was an assistant coach with the Thrashers in the past. I believe that 2007-08 was his final season as a Thrashers’ assistant. He was offered the head coaching job when Bob Hartley was fired, but he turned it down. Honestly, the Thrashers were a pretty screwed up organization and many of us fans couldn’t blame him for turning it down. Taking that job was a recipe for failure and we figured that he didn’t want to harm his chances of getting a head coaching job with a better organization in the future.
As someone who has traveled in the ex-USSR before (disclaimer – only in neighboring Ukraine), I know more about things over there than the average North American fan and I can speak Russian pretty well. The plane that they were using was a Yak-42. I do not respect that plane and I do not respect the few airlines that use it. Russian aviation in general is somewhat risky with lower maintenance and safety standards for all Russian aircraft with the exception of Aeroflot, which is up to western standards. Outside of the really major airports like in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the airports in the ex-USSR are often pretty grim. Takeoffs and landings can be VERY risky at many ex-USSR airports where bizarre flight hours are the norm rather than the exception. I can’t speak to this particular incident, but various airports in the ex-USSR will have regular flights of only 2-3 hours duration that will land or take off at bizarre times like 3 AM. These weird hours have often resulted in fatal crashes that would have been avoided in daylight conditions.
It’s a true tragedy and my thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those involved.
I buy it.
Having flown on Russian airlines (TU-154’s) over in China they’re not the best planes on Earth. Poorly built, poorly laid out, and rattle traps to the extreme. Luckily they’re slowly being phased out in favor of Airbus, Boeing, and post Soviet Tupolev offerings, but obviously not quick enough.
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By my count, this is the ninth major fatal aviation incident involving Russian airlines in the last 10 years (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-10785301). That’s an insanely high number when you compare to countries of comparable population and development. What is going on in the Russian airline industry?
I think that there are a variety of problems at work here. In Ukraine, they have fewer airports (perhaps 5 or 6 or so serve civilians) and they keep normal hours and the domestic airline industry is fairly small, but in general they use either modern planes or Airbus or Boeing built older planes. Russian airports sometimes keep bizarre hours and there’s a lot of pressure to support the terrible, terrible domestic plane building industry. Russia for many years produced subpar planes like the Yak-42.
I suspect, without knowing, that the Russian aviation inspection authority, whatever they have that’s like the FAA in the USA, is probably fairly corrupt and companies can bribe their way out of problems. Plus, since most foreigners refuse to fly on the riskier carriers (in Russia that means ANYBODY not named Aeroflot), there’s no outrage from foreign governments over crashes because few foreigners are killed. Things were so bad in Russia at one time that there was even a commercial plane that apparently crashed because the pilot let his teenage son “drive”. That infamous incident actually happened on Aeroflot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_593
I believe that such an incident would no longer happen as Aeroflot now takes flying very seriously and is very concerned about its image. Unlike the other Russian airline companies, Aeroflot uses mostly Boeing and Airbus planes. They have no Yak-42s in their current inventory as far as I can determine.
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