The plane carrying Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team players crashed shortly after take-off to Minsk, 44 of the 45 people on board lost their lives. Interfax agency quoted an official of the Rosaviatsia company saying that the airplane, a YAK-42, had difficulty taking off and has hit from an antenna in the vicinity of the airport runway in Yaroslavl (about 250 km northeast of Moscow). The plane was engulfed in flames on impact with the ground. Flight conditions were optimal for the flight.
Lokomotiv Yaroslavl is considered one of the East European forces, engaged almost every year in the struggle for the conquest of KHL, a Super transnational hockey league including teams from Belarus, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Russia and Slovakia. In the Yaroslavl squad, coached by Canadian Brad McCrimmon (played, among others, for the Detroit Red Wings and Calgary Flames and twice selected to the NHL All Star Game), known hockey names like Czechs Karel Ranuchek, Jan Marek and Josef Vasicek, slovak legendary player Pavol Demitra and Swedish goalie Stefan Liv. Swedish Embassy confirmed that Liv, Olympic champion with the Swedish team, is among the victims. According to France Presse, five foreign players were on board.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sent the Minister of Transportation on the spot, while President Dmitry Medvedev, who was scheduled for Thursday to participate at a political meeting in Yaroslavl, announced that he will go to the place of tragedy.
In June, a Tu-134 plane crashed near Petrozadovsk because of a pilot error. 47 people were killed. Dozens of YAK-42 type devices, still used for small and medium flights since 1980, are still in use of civil aircraft companies in Russia. The list air disasters involving athletes is long and includes, among others, the tragedy of the teams Manchester United (near Munich in 1958) and AC Torino (1949) or, more recently (1993), Zambia State squad.
Also in another flight to Minsk in 1979, a football team from Tashkent (now Uzbekistan) was in a plane that collided with another plane, both Tupolev belonging to the Soviet Aeroflot company. Among the 150 victims there were 17 players and staff members of the Uzbek team.