Following several crashes with the old Soviet-built Antonov-24 aircrafts over the last years, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said that the plane should be subject to the same measures as another Soviet airliner, the TU-134, which Medeveded ordered to be withdrawn by 2012 after the deadly crash in Petrozavodsk on June 20th.
Medvedev’s statement come after yet another An-24 aircraft, belonging to Angara airline crashed into the Ob river in the Tomsk region in July, as reported by BarentsObserver.
Arkhangelsk based Nordavia operates the An-24 aircraft on several of its routes, including the currently only cross-border flight in the Barents Region from Arkhangelsk via Murmansk to Tromsø in northern Norway.
Just a week after Medvedev said the An-24 aircrafts should be withdrawn from service last summer, Nordavia announced that the company had signed an agreement to buy the European ATR-42 aircraft to repleace the older Soviet built propeller, BarentsObserver reported.
Worldwide, 2011 was an increadibly safe year for commercial air traffic, but Russia did bad on the listing of Aviation Safety Network on the 2011 rankings following the air crashes in the country.
The online scedules and ticket bookings at the Nordavia portal still list the aircraft to operate the route between the two northern Russian cities and Tromsø in Norway for as long as the bookings can be made, till end of March.
No information is published regarding new aircrafts to replace the An-24 on Nordavia’s routes.
Over the first years, the An-24 planes on the routes were operated by Aeroflot, and then under the company name Arkhangelsk Airlines, then re-named Aeroflot Nord before it in 2009 was named Nordavia. Altrough the company has changed its names and ownership many times, it has always been the same aircrafts. They are just re-painted with new logos and colors now and then.
An-24 was first time flying in 1959 and over 1,000 were built until 1978. More than 100 of the An-24 have crashed, according to Wikipedia.
