MOSCOW:
A Russian Airbus with more than 230 people on board was forced to make an emergency landing after takeoff on Thursday after birds were sucked into its engines.There were no immediate reports of serious injuries.
Two Russian pilots safely landed an airliner carrying 233 people in a cornfield outside Moscow after striking a flock of birds, prompting the Kremlin to hail them as heroes who will receive top state awards.
There was an emergency landing in Zhukovsky. Birds got into both engines. Engines turned off, the crew carried out the landing … one kilometer away from the runway," TASS state news agency quoted Ural Airlines' general director, Sergei Skuratovб, as saying.
The Ural Airlines A321 was carrying 226 passengers and seven crew from Moscow's Zhukovsky airport to Simferopol in Russia-annexed Crimea, the Rosaviatsia air transport agency said in a statement.
Russians have said it was a miracle that no one was killed when the Ural Airlines Airbus 321 came down in a field southeast of Moscow with its landing gear up after hitting a passing flock of gulls, disrupting the plane’s engines.
Up to 74 people, including 19 children, were treated for injuries, six of whom have been hospitalized, Russian news agencies quoted the emergencies ministry as saying.
State television said the incident was being dubbed the “miracle over Ramensk”, the name of the district near Moscow where the plane came down around one kilometer (0.62 miles) from Zhukovsky International Airport.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid praised pilot Damir Yusupov as a “hero,” saying he had saved 233 lives, “having masterfully landed a plane without its landing gear with a failing engine right in a corn field.”
Some drew comparisons with U.S. Airways Flight 1549 which performed a landing on the Hudson River in New York in 2009 after striking a flock of geese.
“We congratulate the hero pilots who saved people’s lives,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that the Kremlin would see that the men were quickly given state honors. “There’s no doubt about this. They will be given awards.”