The Tupolev-134 belonging to RusAir, a domestic carrier, crashed into a highway near the Besovets airport, outside Petrozavodsk, in a thick fog. It was unclear whether the pilot was trying to land on the road or had missed the runway. The aircraft careened into a forest, broke apart and caught on fire.
Video from the scene suggested a powerful impact. It showed a charred engine, broken luggage, a wheel and bits of fuselage.
Seven passengers and one member of the nine-person crew — a flight attendant — survived. One woman survived together with her 9-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, according to a list of hospitalized passengers published by the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
The crash coincided with a visit to the Paris Air Show by senior Russian officials who are promoting Russian aviation companies. A deputy prime minister, Sergei Ivanov, told reporters at the air show that it appeared the pilots were to blame.
The crash, he said, “could have been caused by pilot’s error in low visibility,” the Interfax news agency reported. Mr. Ivanov said the government had no plans to ground the Russian fleet of Tu-134 airplanes.
The circumstances just before the fatal crash are being investigated. The plane’s flight data recorders have been found, officials said.
Initially, Russian news agencies cited officials at the airport as saying the plane, descending into the fog around 11:40 p.m., clipped an electrical power line that supplied the airport.
The Echo of Moscow radio station quoted an Itar-Tass news agency correspondent at the scene saying the power loss caused the runway lights to cut out for a few seconds before a backup power source came online.
With the lights out, the pilot appeared to become disoriented and veered away from the runway, coming down on the road instead, the Itar-Tass correspondent said.
Separately, the news agency cited Alexei Morozov, deputy head of the Interstate Aviation Committee, saying the runway lights had failed just as the jet approached.
The Russian Information Agency, however, cited an unnamed official in the Ministry of Transportation saying the failure of the runway lights did not cause the crash. This official said the jet crashed for still undetermined reasons, hitting the power lines as it came to earth, causing the runway lights to go out.
Tupolev jets, such as the one that crashed Monday, are a mainstay of domestic Russian airlines. But many are reaching the end of their service lives. The Tu-134 that crashed Monday was made in 1980.
The Russian aviation industry is replacing Tupolevs with a new regional and business plane called the Superjet, which came into service this year and had its maiden flight with Aeroflot, the Russian national flag carrier, just last week.
The crash came as Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin was in France on Tuesday and to visit the Paris Air Show to promote Russian aviation technology, including the new Superjet.
After three Tupolev crashes at other airlines killed 400 people, Aeroflot in 2009 retired all Tupolev airplanes from its fleet and sold them to regional carriers.
Accidents involving Tupolev jets occur with shocking regularity, despite assurances from Russian officials that they are safe.
Just this year, one Tu-154 caught fire on the tarmac at a Siberian airport, killing three people. Another skidded off a runway in Moscow in an emergency landing after all three engines failed, killing two people.
In April last year, a Tu-154 carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of senior Polish officials crashed into a forest while trying to land in fog near the city of Smolensk. All 96 people on board died.
Tupolev planes have survived some eerie near misses recently, too. President Dmitri A. Medvedev awarded medals to pilots who landed a crippled Tu-154 in a field in the far north, averting catastrophe.
In Moscow, an amateur video of a distressed Tu-154 jet flying low over the city circulated on the Internet and became known as the Dancing Airplane, as it appears to bob and roll in the air uncontrollable yet amazingly lands safely. The plane, which was not carrying passengers, was being flown to a repair facility.
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