Another Aeroflot goes down with 88 casualties, hopefully no mongers were lost!
So the story goes that "technical failure" was the reason that a Boeing 737 crashed in cloudy weather around 3 AM in a deserted residential area of Perm killing all aboard. The flight departed Moscow Sheremetyevo, and was trying to get to the airport in Perm when it went down.
I made that same approach, at the same time, 3 a.m., in April 2006, but with an uneventful landing at the Perm airport. It was pretty foggy, so we needed to use IFR to line up the airport runway lights, but the approach was very low, under the rain clouds, across the city. The pilot knew what he was doing, thank god.
But the reason we landed in Perm, was because our original destination was not possible to land at 3 a.m., because there were NO runway lights working, because the electricity generator for the airport DIDN'T WORK! So we had to wait until around 5:30 a.m. when it was light enough in the morning to find the airport runway without lights. I felt lucky that I made it there in one piece.
According to today's news story, this was the second Russian Boeing plane that crashed in a month. In August, another one crashed killing around 50 passengers shortly after takeoff on a flight from Kyrgyzstan to Iran. Probably not many mongers on that flight, so...