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A321 captain says he was trying to rescue plane, passengers and crew

All the passengers of the crash-landed plane will receive compensations, according to the airport's management company

MOSCOW, August 15. /TASS/. Damir Yusupov, captain of the A321 passenger plane operated by Ural Airlines, which made an emergency landing in the Moscow Region on Thursday, has said that he was trying to rescue the plane, passengers and crew during the emergency.

"Many say that [I am] a hero, but, frankly speaking, I don’t feel like a hero at all, because I did what I had to do, that is, rescue the plane, passengers and crew," he told the Sixty Minutes program broadcast by the Rossiya 1 TV channel.

He noted that the crew had followed instructions. "We were ready for that from the moral and professional standpoint. We have our own simulator in Yekaterinburg, our own school for training flight crews. I believe we managed to land the plane successfully, without serious damage to passengers, thanks to that, thanks to these skills," Yusupov claimed.

The pilots were able to take a sigh of relief when the senior cabin attendant entered the cockpit and said that everyone had been evacuated and no one was killed, he went on to say. "Of course, I felt greatly relieved that everything was more or less OK. Later on, after the passengers had been evacuated, I walked out of the cockpit, examined the visible damage, made sure that all the passengers were at a safe distance, returned to the cockpit and called my wife from there," Yusupov noted.

Compensations to the passengers

All the passengers of the Ural Airlines plane that made an emergency landing early on Thursday, will receive compensations in the amount of 100,000 rubles ($1,511), Evgeny Solodilin, first deputy general director of OJSC Ramport Aero, told reporters.

Ramport Aero is the management company of the Zhukovsky Airport in the Moscow Region.

"By the decision of the airline and the insurance company, all the passengers will be paid compensation worth 100 thousand rubles," Solodilin said.

The incident

On Thursday, a Ural Airlines A321, headed from Moscow to Crimea’s Simferopol, performed an emergency landing in the countryside near Zhukovsky International Airport. According to the Federal Air Transport Agency, the plane suffered a bird strike shortly after takeoff. The crew managed to land the plane in a cornfield and evacuate all the passengers. There were over 230 people, including 41 children, aboard the aircraft.

A criminal investigation has been launched into the circumstances of the emergency landing.

Earlier in the day, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev ordered to draw up documents to recommend the pilots for decoration.