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.

- "Fantastic know-how" -

"Congratulate the pilots, heroes who have saved lives and landed the plane," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

"Thanks to the crew's professionalism and coordinated actions, the landing did not lead to any tragic consequences," Ural Airlines, based in Ekaterinburg in the Urals, said with satisfaction.

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

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 ".

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.

- The landfills involved? -

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.

Some experts have pointed out the problem of garbage in Moscow, where in recent years illegal dumps, sometimes located near airports and attracting all kinds of birds, have multiplied.

"The problem with birds is huge," says aviation safety expert Alexander Romanov to Ria Novosti. "It is particularly related to open dumps in violation of all the rules."

According to residents, there is an illegal dump located between the Zhukovsky Airport and the Moskva River and gulls gather there permanently. An investigation into this landfill was also opened, according to the state agency TASS.

Waste management is a serious problem in Russia, where more than 90% of the 70 million tonnes of garbage ends up in landfills, especially in Moscow, where all sites are saturated to the point of becoming dangerous for neighboring populations. .

Despite many demonstrations of discontent and a reform that came into effect on January 1, the authorities are dragging on to take the problem seriously.

© 2019 AFP