38 Dead in Crash of Passenger Jet in Kazakhstan

UPDATE Dec 25, 2024 10:48 AM CST

Kazakhstan officials say 38 people died in Wednesday's crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines jet with 67 people aboard, reports the AP. The plane en route from Azerbaijan to Russia went down near the Kazakh city of Aktau. No definitive word yet on the cause, but authorities say the plane diverted from its planned course because of bad weather.

Dec 25, 2024 5:42 AM CST

Christmas Day brings news of the crash of a passenger jet in Kazakhstan, with more than 30 people feared dead. What is known so far:

• Casualties: The Azerbaijan Airlines jet had 67 people aboard, five of them crew members, reports the AP. Authorities say at least 29 people have been hospitalized, with the rest feared dead.
• Emergency landing: The Embraer 190 aircraft went down near the Kazakh city of Aktau as the pilots attempted an emergency landing, per the BBC. Flight J2-8243 had been en route from from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to the city of Grozny in southern Russia. Aktau is on the shore of the Caspian Sea.

• What happened? The reason for the attempted landing was not immediately clear. Russia's RIA Novosti news agency reported that a bird strike on the plane led to "an emergency situation on board." The BBC reports the plane had been diverted to Aktau because of fog. It's possible some combination of both factors are at play. Reuters reports that video shows the plane heading to the ground at high rate of speed, with its landing gear down.
• Figure 8: Flight-tracking data from FlightRadar24.com shows the plane making something like a figure-eight near the Aktau airport, "its altitude moving up and down substantially over the last minutes of the flight before impacting the ground," per the AP.

(More plane crash stories.)