A passenger plane with 34 people on board has landed on a frozen river in Russia’s Far East, apparently because of a mistake by the pilot.
No-one was hurt when the Polar Airlines Soviet-era Antonov An-24 plane came to a halt on Thursday morning not far from land, on the frozen River Kolyma.
The plane landed off the runway of Zyryanka airport.
Initial inquiries said pilot error was to blame, prosecutors said. Thirty passengers and four crew were on board.
I used to build ice runways to do arctic exploration. There’s this equation called Gold’s which goes like: w=4h². W is weight in kg, and h is thickness in cm. A 100cm (39") ice slab will bear 40,000kg – or 88,000lbs.
As you can see, because of the ² in the equation, the load bearing capacity scales quite rapidly once it is thick. In the Canadian Arctic, natural ice was quite often 140cm or more in March. We would land cargo planes on the ice and unload bulldozers and other BS like that haha.