Everybody into the penalty box

Ellen Barry and Andrew Kramer have an article in The New York Times about another ugly aviation incident in Russia:

A Russian passenger airliner chartered by one of the country’s best-known hockey teams, Lokomotiv, and carrying numerous veterans of the National Hockey League crashed during take-off near the city of Yaroslavl, killing all but two of the 45 people on board.
Lokomotiv’s coach, Brad McCrimmon, a Canadian who played eighteen seasons in the Lokomotiv between 1979 and 1997, died in the crash, along with Pavol Demitra, the captain of the Slovakian national team, who played sixteen seasons for the St. Louis Blues, the Vancouver Canucks, and three other NHL teams. McCrimmon resigned as an assistant coach with the Detroit Red Wings last May to become Lokomotiv’s head coach. It was his first head coaching job in a professional league.
Three members of the Czech national team, Jan Marek, Karel Rachunek, and Josef Vasicek were also among the victims. Marek, a 2003 draft choice of the New York Rangers, led the Russian league in goal scoring in 2008-9, and Rachunek and Vasicek spent several seasons in the NHL.
Also among the dead were Alexander Karpovstev, an assistant coach who played defense for the Rangers for five seasons, including 1994, when they won the Stanley Cup, and the Swedish goalie Stefan Liv, who tended the nets when Sweden won the Olympic gold medal in 2006.
The only survivors were a crew member and a player, the star forward Aleksander Galimov, who was rushed to a local hospital, a Russian aviation official told the Interfax news agency.
“Though it occurred thousands of miles away from our home arenas, this tragedy represents a catastrophic loss to the hockey world, including the NHL family, which lost so many fathers, sons, teammates, and friends who at one time excelled in our league,” Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League, said in a statement from New York. “Our deepest condolences go to the families and loved ones of all who perished.”
The tragedy brings to mind other catastrophes that have decimated sports programs. In 1961 the entire United States figure skating team was killed en route to the world championships in Prague. All but a few of the members of the Marshall University football team were killed in a 1970 accident in West Virginia, the same year that a plane went down with about half of the Wichita State University football team (other team members were flying in a different plane).
This crash is likely to have a severe impact on Russian hockey. Lokomotiv is a three-time Russian champion, winning its last title in 2003. It has been at the forefront of an effort to rebuild Russian hockey that started with the 2008 formation of the Continental Hockey League, or KHL. The team lost in Game Seven of the opening season’s playoff final, and has been a top contender since.
Billionaire businessmen and large state companies like Gazprom, the energy giant, have been pumping money into the league, improving arenas and raising salaries in an effort to retain players who were being lost to the NHL, and to recruit some North American and European stars as players and coaches. The crash is likely to give those stars second thoughts.
In 2008, a highly touted nineteen-year-old forward, Alexei Cherepanov, who was also a Rangers draft choice, died on the bench at the end of a game of a heart ailment that had gone undetected. The president of the team, Avangard Omsk, and the team doctor were suspended indefinitely by the league for their roles in that tragedy, as well as for administering a banned performance-enhancing drug that was discovered at autopsy.
In 1950, in the only incident in Russia comparable to the Lokomotiv crash, virtually the entire national hockey team died when their plane went down in a snowstorm as it approached the Sverdlovsk airport. The crash was covered up by the team’s manager, Vasiliy Stalin, who feared his father’s reaction. The younger Stalin immediately recruited a new team, and the dictator apparently never knew the difference.
The crash also added to a terrible run of air safety problems in Russia, with eight fatal crashes this year, six of them since June. The Yak-42 jet that crashed was carrying the Lokomotiv hockey team from its home in Yaroslavl, a city northeast of Moscow, to an away game in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in what would have been the second game of the Russian hockey season. It was airborne for only a few moments, roaring over a picturesque village of wooden homes and flower gardens before crashing to earth.
The disaster also claimed the lives of Ruslan Salei, a fourteen-year NHL veteran from Belarus; Karlis Skrastins, a Latvian who played twelve years in the NHL; Igor Korolev, a Russian who played twelve NHL seasons; and Alexander Vasyunov, a Russian who played eighteen games for the New Jersey Devils last season. A spokesman for Lokomotiv, Vladimir N. Malkov, said in a telephone interview: “We have no team any more, they all burned in the crash.”
Near the site of the crash, hockey fans streamed on foot down a village lane until they came to a line of police that blocked off any view off the divers who were retrieving remains from the river.
Young men in track suits struck the bells at the village’s white-washed church over and over again. Yevgeny Bazurenko and three friends stood stone-faced, wrapped in red-white-and-blue Lokomotiv scarves and jerseys. “I don’t know whether they are going to build a new team, or who will be on it,” said Bazurenko, who is sixteen. “All I know is that, for the next five years, there will be no hockey in Yaroslavl.”
The Yak-42 plane was one of the aging Soviet-designed narrow body aircraft that have been the focus of safety concerns after a series of problems and crashes, including one in June that killed most of the fifty passengers on board. The hockey team’s plane came down about five hundred yards from the runway in the village of Tunosha shortly after 4 p.m. The fuselage came to rest partly in a tributary of the Volga River; it was unclear whether the pilot, having encountered an emergency during take-off, had tried to ditch the plane in the water but struck the river bank instead. The veering airplane made explosive noises during its short flight, according to witnesses. The Yak-42, a three-engine, 120-seat jet meant for relatively short flights, first entered service in 1975. About ninety Yak-42s remain in service, mostly in Russia, though some are used in Cuba, Iran, Armenia, Tatarstan, and Kazakhstan. Eight Yak-42s have crashed over the years, with 570 fatalities. The Yak-42D version that crashed Wednesday was last manufactured in 1999.
Aviation authorities in former Soviet nations insisted for years that their civilian airliners were as safe as Western counterparts, but a series of horrifying close calls and deadly accidents have prompted them to back away from those claims. Aviation experts say the age and obsolescence of Russia’s passenger fleet makes mechanical problems and accidents more frequent and more severe. New models are being introduced, like the Superjet, which is intended to replace shorter-range planes like the Yak-42, but only three Superjets have been put into service so far.

Rico says he's just as happy he doesn't have to fly in any of the former Soviet states...