Russian plane crash - entire team wiped out

http://rt.com/news/lokomotiv-plane-crash-tragedy-065/

I know there are only 2 or 3 hockey fans on here, but I can't not post about what was likely the worst sports tragedy to ever happen, An entire team, KHL's Lokomotiv - players and staff - died this Wednesday in a plane crash. 43 people gone, just two survivors with life-threatening burns. The world of hockey is a pretty close community. Half of the players were former NHLers, many of them stars, Olympians, some of them the biggest stars of their countries, ie. Slovakia's Pavel Demitra. Every NHL team and their fanbase lost someone they knew well. An entire city, Yaroslavl, lost their sports team. I'll never forget Igor Korolev, the assistant coach, who used to play in Toronto. Thanks to him I got to go to a hockey game for the first time in my life, when I was just ten years old. That experience made me a life-long fan of the game, the teams and the players.

Russia seems to attract tragedies, especially air tragedies. It's absolutely heart-wrenching at how this keeps on happening and how preventable it all is. It's not that Soviet-made planes are at fault - this is rarely the case in such disasters. The problem lies in shoddy maintenance, greedy management, and a general laissez-faire attitude to the safety of human lives in Russia. That this happened at the same time and in the same city as a global policy forum, with much of Russia's political elite attending, was more than an ironic coincidence. It may have been a contributing factor to the tragedy. The small city's airport was overwhelmed with Gulfstream's and other private jets. The air traffic control was more concerned with the VIP guests than anything else. There is a fuel crisis all over the country at airports - the business behaviour of fuel suppliers is incredibly hard to regulate. There are problems with the quality of the fuel. Apparently, the Yak-42 plane had trouble gaining the necessary speed to take off in time, but went past the point-of-no-return on the runway, crashing a kilometre after takeoff. If this crash won't change the safety situation in Russia, then I don't know what ever will. This, plus the Polish presidential plane crash, the metro bombings, the Domodedovo airport bombing, the various other plane crashes, bus crashes, bridge collapses, and other losses of life, is not enough to even have the minister of transportation fired. Christ!

Terrible. Plane crashes occur far too often in Russia. Time to step up oversight of maintenance standards. The transport ministry should be given a good kick up the backside for repeatedly failing to ensure half-decent standards in the RF's aviation sector. They used to shoot you for less serious grievances.