The An-22 cargo plane. Photo: Ostorozhno Novosti/Telegram
Seven people were killed when a Russian military cargo plane crashed during a test flight over the central Ivanovo region on Tuesday afternoon, state-affiliated daily Kommersant has reported.
The plane, which had been in service for over 50 years, went down over an “uninhabited area”, the Russian Defence Ministry said in comments reported by Interfax, adding that a special Russian Aerospace Forces commission had been set up to investigate the incident.
Citing eyewitnesses, state-affiliated daily Kommersant reported that the aircraft had begun to “disintegrate” while in the air, after which its wreckage fell into the Uvodye Reservoir near the village of Ivankovo.
Kommersant sources said that the Antonov-22, which was the last aircraft of its kind still to be in use in Russia, likely crashed due to a technical malfunction, and that the five crew and two passengers were presumed dead.
Russian aviation has been in the grip of a serious crisis since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, experiencing a 30% rise in safety incidents in 2024 as airlines were increasingly forced to rely on black market spare parts and software due to international sanctions, with many of them resorting to the use of older, Soviet-era planes.
An Angara Airlines Antonov-24 passenger plane, which was manufactured in 1976, crashed in the Russian Far East’s Amur region in July, killing all 43 people on board. The crash occurred over a year after the airline appealed to the Russian government to extend the service life for their older aircraft as they had no way of modernising their fleet due to sanctions.
