A narrow-body airliner operated by Russia’s Ural Airlines and carrying 226 passengers and seven crew, landed with its wheels up in the countryside near Moscow after suffering a "rare" birdstrike.
Bound for Simferopol, Crimea, the Airbus A321 unexpectedly struck “numerous” seagulls or crows shortly after departing from Moscow’s Zhukovsky Airport.
Ural Airlines' A321 crash-landed on a field outside Moscow © Reuters
Having no time to dump fuel and with no deployed undercarriages, the heavy-loaded jet made a belly landing in a cornfield just 1km from the runway. A spine chilling footage from inside the airctaft surfaced online a while later.
Moments before the bumpy touchdown, the malfunctioning engines were switched to avoid fire on board, it has been reported.
Ural Airlines CEO Sergey Skuratov said the scale of the birdstrike was in fact something out of the ordinary.
“It is quite rare, it happens maybe once in 50 years.”
Luckily, there was no blaze on board the ill-fated Airbus and no one died in the incident. Still, 23 passengers – including five children – received injuries, Health Ministry confirmed.
Meanwhile, the airline praised the crew for professionallism during the spine chilling landing as well as for “well-organized evacuation.”
© REUTERS
People later described the traumatic experience they went through.
“The engine clapped several times, they tried to re-activate it but we started going down,” one man wrote on Twitter uploading a video of the jet.
“Now I believe in God, for sure.”
“This is my second birthday,” another woman is heard saying in a video taken by one of the passengers.
The Thursday incident is reminiscent of a 2009 incident known as the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ involving US Airways Flight 1549, when an Airbus A320 flown by Captain Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles hit a flock of geese after takeoff from New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and lost all engine power. Unable to land at any available airport, they had to ditch the jet in the Hudson River outside Manhattan, with all 155 rescued by nearby ferries and boats.