A 36-year-old businessman from Tyumen missed the ill-fated flight to Surgut that crashed shortly after takeoff killing 31 people, the city’s deputy prosecutor general said.
“According to the pre-flight list, there should have been 40 passengers on board, but one person missed the flight and this possibly saved his life,” Valentin Tarasov said.
The lucky survivor, Dmitry Grigoryev, told the Life News portal that he had to go to Surgut on a business trip, but was just too tired to go to the airport after a kite surfing competition and decided to take another flight.
“I had the ticket in my pocket,” Grigoryev said. “But I was returning from the competition in my car and had to spend several hours behind the wheel. The weather was bad, the road was awful, so I got home only by three a.m. local time. I decided to take another flight on Tuesday. I was so tired I did not even call to the airport to change the ticket.”
He said that he learned about the disaster from his colleague’s wife, who called him upon hearing about the crash.
“She asked me if I was alive. Then everything got blurry… The first thing I did was to call my mother,” Grigoryev said.
The survivor said he cancelled his business trips.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to fly to Surgut. Psychologically, this is too hard,” he said.
Dead pilot planned wedding
Nikita Chekhov, the 24-year-old pilot of the crashed plane who is now listed as dead, planned a wedding soon with a woman from the Volga area.
“He was engaged and was planning a wedding,” his former acquaintance, who identified herself as Lyudmila, said.
She said that Nikita was raised by his mother and started working at a very early age “because he knew that he should help his mother.”
His mother, who also has a younger son, is now heading to Tyumen to identify the body.
