LVIV, July 29 – An Su-27 fighter jet clipped the ground and sheared through a crowd of spectators Saturday at an air show in western Ukraine before exploding in a ball of fire, killing at least 78 people and injuring 138 in one of the world’s deadliest air show accidents.
The two crew ejected and survived, the Defense Ministry said, just after the aircraft first grazed the ground and slid backward on its wingtip and nose through hundreds of spectators who had been watching on a clear day at the Sknyliv air base in the city of Lviv.
Bohdan Hupalo, 18, said he was posing for a picture when the plane came down. He dove to the ground and saw the jet race over him, missing by only a few meters (yards). “There weren’t any survivors among those who fell down late – they were cut down like grass,” he said. When Hupalo opened his eyes, he said he was surrounded by human remains. “I will never forget this tragedy,” he said from his hospital bed, where he was being treated for an injured back.
After the crash, parents frantically searched for missing children and used the public address system to call out their names. One group of children with cuts on their faces and arms sat stunned on the ground. Severed body parts littered the tarmac at the air base. One woman was seen clutching the lifeless body of a child in front of a jet on display; another man was covered in blood while he examined the stump left of his right hand.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said 138 people had been treated at hospitals in Lviv, and 24 who were lightly injured had been released. The death toll could still rise because many of the injured were in critical condition, the ministry said.
The two crew suffered back injuries, medical officials told Interfax news agency, but they were seen walking away from the crash scene without assistance. The plane was in the sky for about two minutes and had been performing advanced aerobatic maneuvers, but just before it hit the ground it went silent and banked left – its wingtip shearing trees and touching another plane on the ground. Video of the crash showed the jet then sliding backward along the ground on its left wingtip and nose before it began cartwheeling and then exploded, throwing off flaming debris.
The Defense Ministry’s western operational command said engine failure was the preliminary reason for the crash, but ministry headquarters in the capital Kyiv declined to comment on the cause and refused to confirm an engine malfunction.
President Leonid Kuchma, who cut short his vacation in Crimea to rush to the accident scene, implied that a technical fault could have been to blame, saying after his arrival in Lviv that “this equipment has already functioned to its technological capacity.” Much of the country’s air force arsenal is left over from the Soviet era and in poor condition. “We don’t know anything absolutely except that the pilots were the most experienced, of the highest class,” Kuchma said in comments shown on state television.
Ukrainian officials are especially sensitive about military 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.
Kuchma ordered the secretary of the Defense and Security Council, Yevhen Marchuk, to head for Lviv and lead the government commission investigating the case – which had already begun questioning the jet’s crew, along with other witnesses and watching video of the crash. Prosecutors also started an investigation. Later Saturday, Kuchma fired the commander of the air force as well as the top officer from the 14th Air Corps to which the jet belonged.
About 1,500 people were watching the free air show, the first day of the 14th such event held in the city. Thousands more had been expected Sunday for the main day of the show that marked the 60th anniversary of the local air force unit.
Kuchma said the country would consider a ban on air shows because of the accident. “People should deal with their concrete military activity,” he said in comments shown on state television. “No such shows should take place.”
Lt. Col. Oleksiy Melnyk, a pilot in Ukraine’s air force, blamed air show organizers for allowing the maneuvers so close to the spectators – telling Interfax that regulations require they take place 300 meters (yards) away. The regional governor of Lviv, Liubomyr Buniak, announced two days of mourning starting Sunday. Yaroslav Vaida, a rescue service employee, lost his 24-year-old son and was himself severely injured in the spine. “I don’t want to live, I have no sense to live,” he said in the hospital. “I can hardly speak, but have to say this.”
At one Lviv hospital, handwriting on the wall noted the 33 people who had been treated there – ranging in age from 2 to 62. Of those patients, 11 had died. More than dlrs 1.9 million will be set aside from the federal budget in an initial fund for funerals and first aid for victims, Kuchma said. “We will make sure that every family receives help,” he said.
In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to Kuchma, the presidential press office said.
The Sukhoi Su-27 has been in service since 1985, and has the NATO code name “Flanker.” 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. 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 world’s most deadly previous air show crashes 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.
In September 2000, another Su-27 crashed during maneuvers close to Zhytomyr, western Ukraine, killing only the pilot. The Su-27 is produced in different configurations, with either one or two crew. In the most recent other military plane accident in Ukraine, a pilot was killed in the April crash of a Su-25 jet in Zaporizhzhia that happened after the plane had been under repair.
