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Search for second black box recorder of Russian business jet continues

Emergency management officers are continuing to search for the second black box recorder of a Russian business jet that crashed near Minsk on the night of October 26 killing all five people aboard.

The Hawker-125-800B executive jet took off from the Vnukovo-3 airport in Moscow on Monday and disappeared from radar screens at 9:30 p.m. when approaching the Minsk National Airport.

The plane failed to make the landing on the first attempt and was lost by traffic controllers following the second attempt to land in normal visibility.

According to Belarus’ officials, the visibility was two kilometers and the cloud ceiling was 60 meters high, which was far above minimum satisfactory levels.

The wreckage of the plane was found in woods, a mile away from the landing runway.

The plane belonged to S-Air, a Moscow-based company that runs a fleet of luxuriously appointed private jets. The head of the S-Air airline, Marat Romashkin, and a certain Pavel Malyshev were reportedly on board the plane, apart from three crew members.

A special commission was set up to probe the crash. Led by Boris Goryunov, a departmental chief at the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee, the commission includes officials of Russia’s aviation agency Rosaviatsiya and the Russian Federal Transport Control Service, as well as Uladzimir Nahulevich, chief of the Belarusian transport ministry’s aviation safety inspectorate.