Forty-one people on board a Russian Aeroflot passenger plane were killed on Sunday, including two children, after the aircraft caught fire as it made a bumpy emergency landing at a Moscow airport, Russian investigators said. Television footage showed the Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash bouncing along the tarmac at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport before the rear part of the plane suddenly burst into flames. The Sukhoi Superjet 100 which is manufactured in the Russia’s Far East is the first passenger jet manufactured by Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. The aircraft is manufactured by state owned United Aircraft Corporation, which a join collaboration of the Russian government with various civil and military aircraft manufacturers including Sukhoi and Mikhoyan, both of which provide military fighter jets to India, including the Sukhoi Su-30MKI and MiG-21. The Superjet entered service in 2011 and this is not the first Sukhoi passenger plane to crash as a Superjet crashed in Indonesia in 2012, killing all 45 people on board in an accident blamed on human error. Russian news agencies reported that the plane had been produced in 2017 and had been serviced as recently as April this year. Aeroflot has long shaken off its troubled post-Soviet safety record and now has one of the world's most modern fleets on international routes where it relies on Boeing and Airbus aircraft. However, the plane has been hit by sporadic concerns over safety and reliability, including a December 2016 grounding after a defect was discovered in an aircraft's tail section. Russian officials said on Sunday it was premature to talk of grounding the Sukhoi Superjet for now. The plane is predominantly used by Russian airlines like Aeroflot, but is also used by a few other foreign operators, including a low-cost Mexican airline. The plane, which had been flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of Murmansk, had been carrying 73 passengers and five crew members, Russia's aviation watchdog said. Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia's Investigative Committee, said in a statement that only 37 out of 78 people on board had survived, meaning 41 people had lost their lives. As of now, some passengers are blaming bad weather and lightning. "We took off and then lightning struck the plane," the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr Egorov, as saying. "The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were so scared, we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped down the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground." State TV broadcast mobile phone footage shot by another passenger in which people could be heard screaming. President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev expressed their condolences and ordered investigators to establish what had happened. With Inputs from Reuters<doc-sep>The safety of the Sukhoi Superjet 100 has been called into question following last week’s crash landing in Moscow which killed 41 of the 78 people on board. A Superjet 100, operated by Aeroflot, burst into flames at Sheremetyevo International Airport during an emergency landing. It had taken off from the same airport just minutes before, with reports suggesting lightning struck the aircraft during its ascent. More than 50,000 have now signed a petition calling for the model to be grounded while an investigation into the crash takes place, but Russia’s transport minister, who heads the commission in charge of the inquiry, said for now he didn’t see any reason to do so. What is the Sukhoi Superjet? Introduced in 2011 by Moscow manufacturer Sukhoi, a firm historically associated with military aircraft, the Superjet was the first serious attempt to revive the fortunes of Russia’s civilian aircraft industry. During the Soviet era, the likes of Ilyushin and Tupolev built thousands of jets for the state-owned airlines of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, Russian manufacturers have been unable to compete with the Boeing-Airbus duopoly. The Superjet typically seats between 87 and 98 passengers, making it suited to regional services. The wreck of the Superjet following Sunday's crash landing Credit: Moscow News Agency Which airlines fly the Superjet? Since it entered service in 2011 with Armavia, Armenia’s flag carrier, around 150 have been built, while more than 300 orders have been made. The bulk of them have been delivered to Aeroflot, Russia’s largest and oldest airline. It counts 60 among its fleet, with 150 still to come. Most other operators are also Russian, and unfamiliar to your average British traveller. They include Yamal Airlines (which has 15), Gazpromavia (10), IrAero (9), Azimuth (8) and Yakutia Airlines (3). However, a few non-Russian airlines have also purchased the Superjet. Interjet, based in Mexico City, has 22, with 30 more on order, while Irish regional airline CityJet has ordered 15. None have chosen to ground their aircraft yet. Interjet’s Superjets have been flying to destinations such as Monterrey, Silao, Cancun and Toluca during the last 24 hours. However, orders are already being cancelled – Yamal Airlines has scrapped plans to receive 10. Why are people calling for the jet to be grounded? It is extremely rare for an entire model to be prevented from flying. The de Havilland Comet was grounded for four years, from 1954 to 1958, after a string of accidents. More recently, the 787 Dreamliner suffered a similar fate after experiencing problems with its lithium-ion batteries, including an electrical fire aboard an All Nippon Airways flight. It was kept out of the sky for three months in 2014 while Boeing worked on a revised battery design. The 737 MAX, meanwhile, has been grounded since March 19, 2019, following two fatal crashes involving a Lion Air flight and an Ethiopian Airlines flight. It is not yet clear why the Aeroflot plane was forced to make an emergency landing, nor why that landing went so badly wrong. Investigators are looking into factors including technical failure, human error, and bad weather conditions. But aviation commentators have pointed to the young aircraft’s chequered 10-year history as a cause for concern. The jet has been involved in one fatal accident already, in 2012, when a “Welcome Asia!” promotional flight from Jakarta crashed on Mount Salak with dozens of journalists and aviation executives on board. This accident, in which everyone died, was blamed on pilot error - the flight crew ignored the terrain warning system, believing it to be malfunctioning, and were engaged in conversations with prospective customers, inside the cockpit, minutes before the crash - but there are also lingering questions about the Superjet’s reliability. Mexico’s low-cost carrier Interjet, one its few foreign buyers (many were put off by the 2012 disaster), claimed money back from Sukhoi last year for persistent technical problems. Ireland’s CityJet bought seven Superjets but within months returned them all to the leasing company from which they were hired. Even those Russian airlines that use the model have required persuading. Bloomberg reports that Aeroflot agreed to take 50 only if Sukhoi compensated it for any subsequent downtime. That appears a wise move. According to leaked data for 2018, the average Superjet used by Russian airlines flew for 109 hours a month, about a third as much as a typical Boeing or Airbus aircraft. Is flying becoming more dangerous? It may appear that way, given the increase in fatal accidents seen in the last 18 months. According to the Aviation Safety Network (ASN), which keeps a database of all air travel incidents, 2017 was the safest year in aviation history with just 10 fatal accidents involving commercial flights, resulting in 44 deaths. Last year, however, there were 561 air crash deaths, almost 10 times more than 2017, making it the deadliest year for aviation since 2014. The trend has continued in 2019, with nine accidents and 209 fatalities so far – already four times more than in 2017. But this is still way down on the number of annual fatalities seen in previous decades. More than 1,000 deaths per calendar year was commonplace until just over a decade ago. In 2005 there were 1,075. The figure for 1996 was 1,844. The deadliest year of all time was 1972, when 2,380 people died in 72 accidents involving commercial airliners – a number that is all the more remarkable when you consider how few departures there were compared with today (around 9.5 million, compared with almost 37 million in 2017). Modern air travel remains remarkably safe. Over the past five years, the fatal accident rate has ranged from around one for every 7.5 million departures (2017) to one for every 1.5 million departures (2013). “[2017] was effectively a lovely statistical blip,” said aviation expert David Gleave. “We are a long way from having solved all the problems [with flying], but it is getting safer and there remains a downward trend in the per flight probability [of a crash].” Do Russian airlines have a safety problem? The Aeroflot crash brought the total number of civil airliner accidents involving Russian carriers to 523, with 8,445 fatalities. Only the US, a country that operates around 13 times more flights than Russia each year, has had more (with 840 crashes and 10,770 fatalities). But the vast majority of Russia’s crashes came during the Cold War – and standards have improved considerably since. Aeroflot, today a safe, modernised airline, used to suffer a tremendous number of crashes. Between 1946 and 1989, it was involved in 721 accidents. In 1973 alone, it was involved in 27, in which a total of 780 people lost their lives, making up nearly half of all worldwide air crash deaths for the year. More Aeroflot passengers (8,231) have died in crashes than any other airlines, by a long shot, with Air France in second, with 1,783. But this is in part because of the staggering former size of the carrier, while the airline’s fleet back then featured ageing planes, and those with less-than-glowing safety records. Aeroflot is now counted among the world's safest airlines Credit: GETTY Aeroflot replaced its Soviet-era aircraft with Western-built jets, introducing the Airbus A310 first, and then the A350s and A330s it operates today. It also made a strenuous effort to redefine itself as a modern and reliable airline, hiring two British rebranding consultants to kick-start the process. In 2006, Aeroflot became the 10th airline to join the SkyTeam group, which counts among its members Delta, KLM and Air France, becoming the first former Soviet carrier to do so. A 2015 assessment of the world’s aviation infrastructure by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) found that Russia met or was close to meeting global averages in the “effective implementation” of a number of categories, including airworthiness, accident investigation and licensing. 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KIEV, Ukraine—An Aeroflot-operated Sukhoi Superjet 100 regional passenger jet crashed and burned in a "hard landing" at Moscow's Sheremyetevo airport on Sunday, killing 41 of the 78 passengers on board. Flight 1492 took off on schedule for a two-hour trip to the northern port city of Murmansk, but returned only a few minutes after take-off, having reported an in-flight technical failure. Original reports were of a lightning strike, but an on-board electrical short circuit is now being examined as the cause for the aircraft catching fire. Aviation observers are not surprised by the crash. The Superjet has a history of numerous safety problems that have caused emergency landings. One aircraft was completely lost and all on board killed in 2012 when it flew into the side of a mountain in Indonesia because the flight crew ignored the terrain avoidance warning system (TAWS). It has had little commercial appeal and its developmental cost ended up being almost four times the manufacturer's estimate. Aeroflot, which is Russia's national carrier, and some other Russian airlines have been forced to take delivery of some Superjets because it is a domestic product, according to a Russian aviation specialist in Moscow. In 2011, Russian journalist Ilya Varlamov recounted his experience with the aircraft. He described several flaws of the aircraft that were being covered up. Varlamov flew on the Superjet with Armavia airlines and claimed photographs on board were strictly prohibited and said the plane was falling apart despite having been in operation for less than a month. Varlamov went on to describe hatches that didn't hold oxygen masks, overhead baggage compartments that spontaneously opened, and cheap thin film on the windows. By 2012, Armavia had declared it no longer wished to take delivery of the second and third Superjet models it had on order and that it also wanted to transfer the aircraft that Varlamov had flown on the year before back to the manufacturer due to its unreliability. In December 2010, the Italian national carrier Alitalia dropped a $500 million order of the Superjet after repeated delays. Alitalia purchased the popular regional E-jet models from Brazil's Embraer instead. Other Superjet sales that were announced with great fanfare at various international air shows have failed to materialize. So far only 300 of the aircraft have been ordered and slightly more than half that number produced. Critics have pointed out that the Superjet was designed by Sukhoi, which has a long history of developing fighter aircraft but no experience designing commercial passenger aircraft, where cost savings are a far greater priority. The Komsomolsk-na-Amure plant (KNAAPO) where the Superjet is built is known for high levels of sophistication and engineering skill in the production of Sukhoi fighter jets—including the Su-57 fifth-generation Russian fighter that is currently in flight test validation. Many of the Superjet's on-board systems are foreign-made, making the purchase of spare parts for the aircraft complicated due to the many sanctions that have been levied against Russia for its invasion and illegal occupation of regions in Ukraine. The aircraft has earned the enmity of most of the air crew personnel that work Superjet flights, a sign of an inferior design. Just after the 2012 crash in Indonesia, an Aeroflot flight attendant, Ekaterina Solovyeva, was fired from the airline after she tweeted, "Huh? Did a Superjet crash? Hahaha! This aircraft sucks, it's a pity it wasn't one [of those in service] with Aeroflot, then there would be one less."