Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey club is wiped out in a plane crash Sept. 7, 2011
On September 7, 2011 the hockey world was rocked by the loss of nearly all members of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team from the Russian Kontinental Hockey League.
YAK-Service Flight 9633, carrying the Lokomotiv team, took off from Yaroslavl, Russia. The plane stalled out during take off and crashed. Only one of the 45 aboard survived, with the team wiped out.
On the fateful afternoon, members of the Lokomotiv team, one of the top clubs in the KHL, boarded the Yak-42 at the Tunoshna Airport in Yaroslavl, a city of 590,000 some 250 kilometres northeast of Moscow.
Shortly after 4 p.m., with airline staff and the team’s coaches and players on board, the plane began to head down the runway for Minsk, where they were scheduled to play their season opener.
Just minutes later came the thunderous crash and plumes of black smoke as the plane slammed into a muddy riverbank about two kilometres from the runway. One man, flight engineer Alexander Sizov, would survive.
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Players and coaches from around the hockey world were part of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, including quite a few who had made their names in the NHL prior to signing on with LY. Among those killed was Brad McCrimmon, a Stanley Cup winning player from Sask., who was coach of the LY.
Twenty-three Russians, three Ukrainians, three Czechs, three Belarusians and a Slovak, a German, a Swede, a Latvian and a Canadian. One of the proudest teams in the Kontinental Hockey League. A 52-year-old franchise, as storied as any in Russia, about to commence an eight-month campaign against 23 teams spread across eight time zones of the former Soviet Union, each team fighting for the Gagarin Cup, Russia’s greatest hockey prize.
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