Plane crash in Russia kills 36, including entire roster of KHL team-Russia's national hockey league

[Zoetstofzoetje]

In Soviet Russia, plane crashes you!

RIP

[Uncle Sparky]

[-Jrabbit]

Very sad. A couple ex-Hawks in the group, I gather... Alexander Karpovtsev and Igor Korolev.

RIP.

[Serb]

Wow.

Karel Rachunek, Ruslan Salei, Karlis Skrastins, Pavol Demitra and Josef Vasicek all killed.

Jan Marek and Stefan Liv too. It's a huge tragedy not only for Russians, but for Czechs, Slovaks, Swedish, Byelorussians, Ukranians, Germans and Latvians. Those guys were stars of their national teams. Huge loss. Their coach was Canadian as you might know. Only one player survived. He is in critical condition with 90% of his skin burnt.
Disaster. Their goalie played for my home city team for ten years. He is sorta legend for the funs of my own team. Can't believe all of them dead. Rest in peace.

[Serb]

4 members of the youth team were on board.

Two of them were U20 World champions. Remember that legendary game when we beat you in the finals 5-3?
This is the game vs. Finland:

Both Urychev (scores) and Sobchenko (assists) are dead. Both were just 20 years old. So young, so talented

[Serb]

Now conflicting reports on if Salei was actually on board.

He was.

http://rt.com/news/yaroslavl-plane-crash-hockey-043/

Russian EMERCOM confirmed this. So it's the offical list.
R.I.P.

[Asher]

[Asher]

http://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/article/1050801--feschuk-last-minute-decision-to-stay-spared-coach-s-life?bn=1

Last-minute decision to stay spared coach’s life

When he heard the horrific news of a plane down and most of a team dead, Jorma Valtonen said his first reaction was disbelief.

The players feared gone, the coaches presumed perished — Valtonen had been enjoying lunch with all of them only a few hours earlier at the training base of Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, a top club in Europe’s best hockey league. But after a meal of fish and mashed potatoes, fates diverged.

The 65-year-old Valtonen, the team’s Finnish goalie coach, had expected to be on the doomed flight to the season-opening game in Minsk, in the neighbouring country of Belarus. The club had even obtained for him the necessary visa for the journey.

When management made a last-minute choice to leave Valtonen behind, Valtonen acknowledged that he had been “kind of disappointed.” It was impossible for him to know at the time that the decision that rankled him had also saved his life.

The team’s charter plane crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday afternoon, killing 43 people on what Rene Fasel, the president of the International Ice Hockey Federation, called “the darkest day in the history of our sport.”

Two survivors rescued from the fiery wreckage of the Yak-42 jetliner, 26-year-old right-winger Alexander Galimov and crew member Alexander Sizov, were badly injured but reportedly still fighting for life.

Valtonen, at the same time, was left to ponder the swerve of fortune that spared his.

“I don’t know what to say. It seems I was lucky. But it’s horrible. Horrible,” Valtonen said over the phone from Yaroslavl on Wednesday. “I’ve been answering emails and text messages from my friends asking if I am alive or not.”

Before he answered those emails, Valtonen made a call to Yuri Karmanov, one of the team’s scouts. It was Karmanov who had suggested to the club’s general manager that Valtonen forgo travelling.

Karmanov explained that he thought Valtonen would be more useful if he stayed in Yaroslavl, a city of about 600,000 some 240 kilometres northeast of Moscow, to work with Lokomotiv’s second-tier professional team and its youth hockey school.

Said Karmanov on Wednesday from Russia: “Jorma just called me crying, saying, ‘Thank you, Yuri, you saved my life.’ I think we are all in shock.”

Valtonen’s good fortune hardly dulled the bleakness of the moment. He, like most of the coaching staff, had only joined the team this summer.

But Valtonen, who patrolled the crease for the Finnish national team in three Olympics, including the 1980 Lake Placid Games, said he had already formed a bond with his colleagues, among them head coach Brad McCrimmon, the former NHLer and Team Canada defenceman who, at age 52, was among the dead.

“I feel really, really sad, because, of course, you’ve got friends on the team, you’re working two months with them, every day, every day,” said Valtonen, a member of the IIHF’s Hall of Fame.

“This morning I was at practice with the team, I had lunch with the team, and then I went back home. I wished them good games, and bring us back some points, and then this happened. You can never accept something like this.”

At lunch on Wednesday, Valtonen said the team’s spirits were upbeat. Perhaps optimism always reigns on the eve of an opener, but Yaroslavl Lokomotiv, which plays in the Russia-based Kontinental Hockey League, had been enjoying some heartening preseason success.

The team had won a tournament in Riga, Latvia. And more to Valtonen’s specialty, No. 1 goaltender Stefan Liv, a Polish-born Swede who was a 2000 draft pick of the Detroit Red Wings, had recently gone three games without allowing a goal. Liv, age 30, also died in the crash.

“Everybody was in a good mood at lunch. Everything went just fine during the (preseason),” Valtonen said. “We’d been playing better and better all the time. We had high expectations. A championship is always the only goal here in Yaraslavl.”

If a championship is always the goal, bringing along the club’s young prospects is ever a priority. Valtonen said that devotion to development ultimately explained the decision that kept him off the jet.

“I was a little disappointed, but I have a contract that says I have to work with all the teams, so I said, ‘Okay, I’ll stay here and work with the second-team goalies, the young guys.’ That seems to be my luck,” Valtonen said. “It’s still difficult to believe it has happened.”

Not long after he heard the news, Valtonen said he took a walk to ponder the events of a grim afternoon. He also got word that Yaroslavl’s second-tier team was due on the ice on Thursday morning; that many of the young players on that squad had friends aboard the plane that crashed.

Valtonen planned to be there to coach them, to counsel them, to grieve with them. And perhaps he would mull the inexplicability of fate with one of them; Valtonen said the club had also considered bringing a third goalie, a call-up from the second team, on the road trip, but decided against it.

“I’m supposed to go to practice tomorrow. I’ll go there and we’ll see what the state of the club is, and the picture of how we go on. I don’t know what we’ll do. I don’t know,” Valtonen said, his voice trailing off. “It’s very difficult. Very difficult. And I think the hardest time is still ahead.”

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

In Soviet Russia, plane crashes you!

Classy.

[KrazyHorse]

Par for the course, I'd say.

[Serb]

In Soviet Russia, plane crashes you!

You obviously pick-up a right time for your dumb jokes, dumbass.
FYI, in Soviet Russia planes haven't fell so often as they do now when Russia is not Soviet anymore.
Yak-42 in service since middle 70's. And it's a 9th incident with a plane (and only two incidents were due to mechanical failures others are crew errors and hursh weather conditions). Notice also that out of nine planes that crushed only three belonged to Russian/Soviet companies and had Russain/Soviet crews. So you can pretty much shove your "crappy planes, crappy maintenance, crappy pilots" argument in your ass.

Yak-42 and Boeing-727 are planes of the same class.
Yak-42 - 9 incidents in 36 years
Boeing-727 - 40 incidents in 45 years.
Go, figure.

[Serb]

I guess the KHL season start will be postponed because of that.

Yep. It's officially postponed now.

http://en.khl.ru/news/2011/9/8/24154.html

[Pekka]

Is Galimov still fighting?

Damn it's still weird, even after sleeping one night. So what do you do after a tragic event like this? I guess you just wait and see what happens. It's going to be a weird season for sure.

[Serb]

Is Galimov still fighting?

Thanks God - yes. He's been transfered to one of the Moscow's clinics (according to news on Sovetskii Sport site 46 minutes ago).

[onodera]

I doubt they'll save him. 90% burns are usually fatal.