July 06, (THEWILL) – Contact has been lost with a passenger plane carrying 28 people in Russia’s remote Far Eastern peninsula of Kamchatka, local officials said Tuesday.
The An-26 was flying from Kamchatka’s main city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to the coastal town of Palana when it disappeared and failed to land as scheduled, Valentina Glazova, a spokeswoman for the local transport prosecutor’s office, told AFP.
She said that on board were 22 passengers and six crew members.
“Search and rescue efforts are underway. All that is known at this time, what has been possible to establish, is that communication with the plane was interrupted and it did not land,” she said.
She said the plane had been operated by a local aviation company in Kamchatka, a vast peninsula on Russia’s Pacific coast popular with adventure tourists for its abundant wildlife and live volcanoes.
Russian news agencies quoted local officials as saying most of the passengers were from Palana, a population of about 3,000 people —including four local government officials and the town’s head Olga Mokhiryova.
Kamchatka’s government published a list of 28 people who were on board the plane, including Mokhiryova and one child born in 2014.
It said that communication with the plane had been lost 9 kilometres (5.5 miles) from Palana’s airport.
A source told news agency TASS: “Search for the plane was underway with a radius of 15-25 kilometres (9-15 miles) around the airport, with a focus on the Okhotsk Sea.
“There is objective evidence that the plane crashed and fell into the sea.”
The Kamchatka government said the peninsula has five An-26 planes servicing its remote points.
The regional transport ministry and the local aviation company said the plane was in good condition and had passed safety checks.
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