Moscow (AFP)

The Russians hailed as "heroes" the pilots of an Airbus A321, which made Thursday a spectacular emergency landing in a cornfield with 233 people on board, after hitting a flock of birds.

In the early morning, the aircraft of the Russian airline Ural Airlines took off from the airport of Zhukovsky, a suburb of Moscow, to Simferopol, capital of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014 by Russia.

But at take-off, the aircraft with 226 passengers and 7 crew members "struck a flock of seagulls", many of which ended up in the Airbus engines causing "significant disruption to their aircraft. "according to the Federal Aviation Agency Rosaviatsia.

The crew of the plane then decided to land urgently "in a corn field (...) located more than one kilometer from the runway, without landing gear," explained the l agency, noting that "no fire has occurred on board".

The incident injured 23 people including 9 children, according to the Russian Ministry of Health. Twenty-two of them received medical assistance before being sent home, while a 69-year-old woman was hospitalized, the ministry said in a statement.

"Thanks to the professionalism of the crew and its coordinated actions, the landing did not lead to tragic consequences," said Ural Airlines, an airline based in Yekaterinburg in the Urals.

- "Heroic act" -

"The crew of the Urals company has demonstrated fantastic craftsmanship and self-control," greeted the governor of the region where the company is based, Yevgeny Kuyevachev, on Instagram. The pilot-in-command Damir Yusupov, from Yekaterinburg, and his team "saved 233 lives, they are heroes," he said.

"In this very difficult situation, the pilots have made the right decisions, without doubt it is a heroic act," Nikolai Tsukanov, a representative of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Urals, said in his statement.

The pilots were thanked in many messages on social networks, sent by the passengers of the plane.

"I'm grateful to the pilots as much as to God, because we landed and because we did not crash," wrote one of them on Twitter.

"Everybody is alive!" The pilot is a genius! ", Another passenger, Olga, told the popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, saying that the successful emergency landing had been greeted with" applause ".

Svetlana Babina, also on board during the landing, assures Ria Novosti that she heard "a weird noise in the engine" just after takeoff. "But we must do justice to the pilot because in this situation, the landing was as gentle as possible, he adds.

The crew "helped to evacuate, cared for our lives, and it seems to me that thanks to that, everything has been done for us," Ria Novosti Ekaterina Svetchnikova, another A321 passenger, told us.

An investigation was opened after this incident and a special commission of the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee (MAK), responsible for investigating air accidents in Russia, was set up to study the circumstances.

In May, the fire of a Sukhoi Superjet 100 after its emergency landing at Sheremetyevo airport in Moscow killed 41 people. Investigators had pointed to the decommissioning of lightning-controlled autopilots and probable pilot errors that led to the tragedy.

© 2019 AFP