Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 27, 2002

KIEV, Ukraine — A fighter jet slammed onto the tarmac and sliced through a huge crowd watching an air show Saturday, killing at least 70 spectators and injuring 111 in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, emergency officials said.

The two pilots ejected and survived, the Defense Ministry said, just before the Su-27 crashed and erupted into a massive ball of flame that engulfed onlookers at Skniliv Airport.

The plane was in the sky for about two minutes, but then it appeared to go silent and headed toward the ground and banked left — its wingtip clipping trees and touching another plane on the ground before it crashed.

The Defense Ministry declined to comment on the cause of the accident, but its western operation command said engine failure was the preliminary cause of the crash.

The weather was good at the time.

The Emergency Situations Ministry said the death toll could still rise because many of the injured were in critical condition. The explosion sent fragments of the plane showering over the spectators.

"I could only grab children and hold on. We were thrown away and hands and legs were flying all around us," said one spectator, Zinovy, who did not give his last name. He and his child were injured.

The pilots appeared to eject from the plane at a very low altitude. Parents frantically searched for missing children and were asking that officials use the public address system to call out their names.

"The fire has been extinguished, but there's lots of blood," said Oleksandr Kachkovskyi, an aide to the head of the Lviv regional administration.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma cut short his vacation and flew to Lviv. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to Kuchma, the presidential press office said in Moscow.

Kuchma also ordered the secretary of the Defense and Security Council, Yevhen Marchuk, to head for Lviv and lead the government commission investigating the case.

The plane was conducting complicated aerial maneuvers at the show, marking the 60th anniversary of a local air force unit.

The Su-27 has been in service since 1985. Its speed and maneuverability made it one of the key planes in the former Soviet air force, and it resembles the U.S. F-15 Eagle fighter with two rear stabilizers and twin engines. The Su-27's NATO code name is "Flanker."

The program at the air show featured Su-27 and Mig-29 warplanes, as well as gliders, light-engine planes and parachute jumping, Interfax said.

A Sukhoi Su-30 jet — a similar twin-engine design to the Su-27 — crashed at start of the Paris air show in 1999, but the two pilots ejected and no one was injured.

One of the most deadly crashes at an air show was at a U.S. air base in Germany in 1988, when Italian jets performing a complicated maneuver collided and spiraled into the crowd, killing 70 and injuring at least 400.

Ukrainian officials are especially sensitive about air accidents after last October when an errant missile fired from a Ukrainian military base shot down a Russian plane, killing all 78 people on board, most of them immigrants to Israel.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,58891,00.html