Whipping winds focus of inquiry into airline crash in Russia

MOSCOW — Winds were gusting before dawn Saturday over the airport in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don when a plane carrying 62 people from a Russian holiday destination decided to abort its landing.

[...] a Russian Aeroflot plane scheduled to land around the same time made three attempts at landing before diverting to another airport, according to Flightradar24, an aviation website.

Grainy video footage, apparently from a security camera near the airport that was posted on Russian websites, showed a plane streaking toward the ground at a steep angle, then exploding.

“By all appearances, the cause of the air crash was the strongly gusting wind, approaching a hurricane level,” said Vasily Golubev, governor of the Rostov region 600 miles south of Moscow.

According to weather data reported by Russian state television, when the FlyDubai plane first tried to land, the winds at ground level weren’t dangerously strong, but at an altitude of 1,640 feet and higher they reached a near-hurricane speed of around 67 mph.