FORTY-ONE people died after an Aeroflot flight carrying 78 people caught fire on 5 May while making an emergency landing at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow, Russia. Footage of the incident appears to show the undercarriage giving way after the plane bounced while landing.
The Russian-made Sukhoi Superjet took off at 6 pm and attempted to land 28 minutes later. A lightning strike just minutes after take-off reportedly disabled its main radio and automatic control systems.
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The plane, which was headed for Murmansk, reportedly landed with full fuel tanks, which would have made it much heavier than during a normal landing. When planes have to land soon after take-off, it is usual to dump excess fuel or circle to burn it up before landing.
Bouncing off the runway tends to happen when planes land too fast. But according to Russian news media, the pilot says he followed the procedure for landing with excess weight and did so at a normal speed.
Some of the passengers who escaped the crashed plane were carrying hand luggage, prompting speculation that people retrieving luggage may have caused critical delays during an evacuation in which every second counted.
Passenger planes tend to be struck by lightning once a year on average and are usually unaffected by it, says electrical engineer Manu Haddad of Cardiff University in the UK, who designs protective systems for planes.
The fuselage acts like a Faraday cage, protecting those within. All equipment is shielded to prevent lightning inducing currents that could damage it or create sparks that might set fuel alight.
“If it’s the lightning that caused this damage, the protection system did not work,” says Haddad. That could be due to a design flaw or to the shielding being compromised for some reason, he says.
