Russian plane crash survivor tells her how landing made her feel like her 'eyes almost popped out'

Smoke billows from the wreckage of the crashed plane
AFP/Getty Images

Survivors of the Russian Aeroflot plane crash have continued to come forward to share their accounts of the horror of escaping he tragedy which killed 41 passengers.

Marina Sitnikova told Russian magazine Snob: "Everything happened right away, at lightning speed. There was a strong blow – my eyes almost popped out – a second was a little quieter, a third, and then smoke, and it started to burn immediately."

The plane took off from Moscow on Sunday and was airborne for 28 minutes before it had to make an emergency landing. What caused it to explode into a fireball is stil under investigation. Officials are probing why the plane did not dump its excess fuel shortly before the so-called 'hard landing'.

The rough touchdown – which saw the plane bounce down the runway at Sheremetyevo airport – engulfed the jet in flames, killing more than half of the 78 people on board.

The aircraft’s pilot Denis Evdokimov told Russian news media he followed procedures for landing with excess weight and so didn’t know why the plane landed so forcefully.

But the crew reportedly did not dump any fuel, which is common practice in crafts found to be overly heavy.

When the plane came to a halt, some of passengers were able to escape down inflatable slides deployed from the forward part of the plane.

However, evacuation was allegedly delayed by some passengers who insisted on collecting their hand luggage first, according to the Interfax news agency.

"I do not know what to say about people who ran out with bags. God is their judge," survivor Mikhail Savchenko wrote on Facebook.

A woman lights a candle at a makeshift memorial to the victims of the crash that killed 41 people
REUTERS

A number of survivors have praised flight attendants for helping save him and others.

"It was dark and there was gas, very high temperature. They helped people out of there, helped them to descend," Dmity Khlebnikov said, according to Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Flight attendant Maxim Moiseev was among the people to have died in the crash. He is understood to have been in the fire-ravaged back part of the plane, and tried unsuccessfully to deploy an evacuation slide.

Mr Evdokimov blamed a lightning strike for a loss in radio communications, as storms passed through the Moscow area. It is unclear whether the communication failure precipitated the emergency landing.

Investigations are underway to determine potential causes of the crash: inexperienced pilots, equipment failure or bad weather.
AP

A flight attendant said there was a sharp flash soon after the Aeroflot flight took off, bound for the northern city of Murmansk.

"We took off, got into a cloud, there was strong hail, and at that moment there was a pop and some kind of flash, like electricity," flight attendant Tatiana Kasatnika said in a video posted on YouTube.

Russia's main investigative agency said both of the plane's flight recorders – data and voice – were recovered from the charred wreckage.

Agency spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko announced that investigators were looking into three main potential causes of the disaster: inexperienced pilots, equipment failure and bad weather.

Jeremy Brooks, a recent college graduate from Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been named as one of the passengers killed. The 22-year-old was on his way to work as a fishing guide in northwest Russia.

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