A Russian passenger plane's emergency landing in a cornfield near Moscow after birds were sucked into its engines has been hailed by state media as a "miracle" and compared to a 2009 U.S. flight's landing after striking a flock of geese, APA reports citing Moscow Times.
The Ministry of Health said 23 people had suffered injuries, but that nobody had been killed when the Ural Airlines Airbus 321 came down in a field southeast of Moscow after striking a flock of gulls, disrupting its engines. The plane was traveling from Moscow to Crimea's Simferopol with 234 people on board.
“There was an emergency landing in Zhukovsky. Birds got into both engines. The engines turned off and the crew carried out the landing ... one kilometer away from the runway,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted Ural Airlines' general director, Sergei Skuratov, as saying.
One of the engines caught fire after the birds were sucked into them but the fire didn't spread into the passenger cabin, TASS quoted an unnamed emergency services source as saying.
The 23 injured passengers include nine children, the emergency services source told TASS. Those who were injured had been taken to nearby hospitals, the agency added.
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