A Russian passenger plane on Monday crashed shortly after take-off in Siberia, killing 32 and leaving 11 survivors.
“Eleven people were injured and 32 killed,” Moscow's emergency ministry said in a statement, adding that some 232 rescue workers and investigators had responded to the crash site.
The ministry said the French-Italian made ATR-72 liner crashed 28 miles from the western Siberian city of Tyumen while heading for Surgut.
Surgut is the headquarters of the Surgutneftegaz energy company, one of Russia’s largest oil and natural gas producers.
The ATR-72 twin-engine plane was operated by UTair − a private Russian airline that conducts most of its flights in the energy-rich regions of Western Siberia and the Ural Mountains.
Russian aviation remains blighted by repeated accidents involving its ageing fleet of planes
Russia announced plans to recall the licenses of 30 smaller airlines in response to a September 2011 plane crash that claimed the lives of 44 people − most of them members of the championship-winning ice hockey team Lokomotiv Yaroslavl.
A plane carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and other top officials came down in fog near the Russian city of Smolensk in April 2010 in an accident that killed 96 people and damaged ties between Moscow and Warsaw.
President-elect Vladimir Putin has made industry reform one of the top priorities of his third term as Kremlin chief − and has ordered Russia’s older planes to be put out of service by the end of the year.
He has also ordered pilots and smaller air carriers to be put to strict new tests and regulations.
But plans to eliminate smaller carriers that employ just a handful of planes as a safety precaution have run up against the reality that Russia lacks the fleet necessary to span the country’s vast distances.