Shocked and wailing relatives of 145 people killed in an air crash gathered at Russian airports yesterday waiting for flights to the scene of the country's worst civil air disaster in years.
Investigators sifted through smoking wreckage in a clearing in Siberian woods and recovered both flight recorders from the Tupolev 154 airliner, but there were few clues to the cause of the crash which occurred late on Tuesday.
Television pictures showed a crash site strewn with debris and corpses. Only the plane's rear wing was intact, bearing the logo of airline VladivostokAvia.
Officials said there were no survivors.
The plane went down while circling for a scheduled landing in Irkutsk, halfway through a flight from Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains to Vladivostok on Russia's Pacific coast.
It made two abortive attempts to land and crashed on its third approach, Russian media said, dropping from the sky about 30km from Irkutsk and bursting into flames.
"They are not telling us why the plane crashed, but what they are telling us is that the pilot's last words were, `I see the landing strip,'" said Roza Gavrikova, weeping at Yekaterinburg airport. Her husband had been on the flight.
"Son. Granddaughter," said an elderly man who clutched his face and burst into sobs.
Flight attendant Svetlana Bas-manova, whose crew alternated shifts with the doomed crew, said among her lost colleagues were a husband and wife who left behind seven children.
"We arrived on that flight, and said goodbye to the girls [in the departing crew]. As always we wished them clear skies," she said. "I never want to fly. I'm going home by train."
A representative of the ministry of emergencies said 143 bodies had been found at the scene of the crash.
Yekaterinburg airport spokesman Valery Goncharov said the plane had been carrying 136 passengers and nine crew, including 12 Chinese nationals and six children.
The Tupolev 154, the main medium-range workhorse of Russia's civil jet fleet, has been involved in three other major crashes on Russian soil since 1994, killing more than 350 people.
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