Condition of 7 survivors of N W Russia jet crash very heavy

MOSCOW, June 21 (Itar-Tass) - Condition of seven out of the eight
people who survived an airliner crash near the northwest Russian city of
Petrozavodsk late Monday night is very heavy, a source at the federal
Ministry for Emergency Situations and Civil Defense /EMERCOM/ said.
The Tupolev-134 jet belonging to the Rusair airline took off from
Moscow's Domodedovo airport at 22:30 Monday. Slightly less than an hour
and half later it crash-landed on an automobile road some 2 kilometers
away from the Petrozavodsk airport compound.
Upon hitting the ground, the jet broke apart and caught fire
It had 55 people aboard, including a nine-strong crew. The accident
carried away 44 lives as a minimum.
Only one member of the crew, flight attended Yulia Skvortsova,
survived. At the time of reporting, physicians in Petrozavodsk were making
drastic efforts to save her life.
The rest of the cabin and cockpits crews have died.
The list of the passengers who boarded in Moscow features the names of
the Russian soccer football referee Vladimir Pettai and the Swedish expert
on rescue operations, Jacob Wettrup, who was going to Petrozavodsk to take
part in a seminar.
The jet's flight recorders have been found and the experts are
examining their technical condition.
Aviation industry sources point to poor weather conditions in the
Petrozavodsk as to the most probable cause of the accident, although
investigators are probing into all the possible causes.
Along with this, an outage of ground systems ensuring the safe landing
of jets at the airport might have added to the problems during the
landing, said Alexei Morozov, a deputy chairman of the CIS Interstate
Aviation Committee and the man in charge of investigating air accidents.
"An outage of ground control systems occurred," he said, adding that a
commission for investigating the crash near Petrozavodsk was to leave
Moscow about 06:00 hours Tuesday.