MOSCOW, July 27 -- A military jet performing aerial acrobatics plummeted from the sky and plowed into a crowd at an air show in western Ukraine today, killing at least 78 spectators and injuring scores of others in the worst air show disaster in aviation history.
Bodies littered the ground at the Sknyliv airfield outside the city of Lviv, including those of children hit by flaming shrapnel. Parents clutched sons and daughters bloodied, burned and bruised from the crash of the Russian-built Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet. Survivors desperately called out the names of missing relatives over the loudspeaker.
Officials were still treating the injured and counting the dead tonight, but preliminary reports indicated that the fatalities included seven children, and that 115 people were taken to hospitals. The two pilots managed to eject before the crash. Survivors described a scene of grisly horror as the jet failed to pull out of a dive and smashed into the tarmac where children were posing for pictures in the co*ckpit of a parked transport plane.
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"There was just shock and disbelief and a state of terror," Sergei Karanaukhov, 46, who was there with his 11-year-old son, said in a telephone interview tonight. "There were children torn apart. There was a boy of 3 or 4. He came with his mother and father. They died and he survived."
The mayhem at Lviv marked a heart-rending conclusion to what started as a festive day intended to celebrate the 60th anniversary of a local air force wing. It also marked the second major air calamity for Ukraine in the past year, following the accidental shooting down of a civilian passenger jet during military exercises in October.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who cut short a Crimean vacation to fly to Lviv, appointed a commission headed by his national security adviser to investigate the incident. While no cause was immediately determined, some officials and veteran pilots speculated that the jet's twin engines might have failed as the pilots were diving toward the field.
Appearing visibly shaken as he inspected the site of the catastrophe, Kuchma fired the air force commander, called for an end to military air shows and declared a national day of mourning for Monday. "There are no words to describe this horrible tragedy," he said at the scene. "It's like a dreadful dream."
Kuchma promised to set aside $1.9 million for the victims and their families.
The plane's final moments, captured on videotape, suggested that the pilots lost control of the 17-ton machine as they were bottoming out of a roll. The jet had just gone into a spiral, racing toward the ground, but instead of pulling up it kept heading down, the noise of its engines suddenly disappearing. It silently sliced through trees, tilted to the side and clipped the tarmac with its left wing, sending the jet into a deadly somersault, hitting a parked plane and barreling into the crowd.
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The fighter jet exploded in a fireball, shooting blazing shards of metal at people nearby. As panicked bystanders screamed and ran, a billowing plume of pitch black smoke rose over the field.
"There were fragments of people lying by the plane," Roman Andreiko, a local television executive, told reporters afterward. "There were clouds of smoke. People were in shock."
Among them was a woman who found a loved one who appeared lifeless on the ground. In footage shown on television here, the woman leaned down and prodded the young girl again and again. "Katya!" she yelled. "Katya!"
A man wandered around with his scalp covered in blood. Small children with blood-soaked clothes called out for their parents. Organizers read out names over the loudspeaker, summoning people to the stage to reunite separated families. Authorities prevented anxious people from approaching the area around the carnage, prompting outrage.
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"You're murderers!" one man, his head splattered with blood, screamed at police officers who would not let him near the accident site, according to Karanaukhov. "You're worse than brutes. Don't you understand my daughter is in there?"
Karanaukhov, a journalist for a Ukrainian newspaper, said he had been at the area hit by the plane just minutes before, but that his son Maxim wanted to get a drink. He turned around to see the plane swooping toward the earth, its wing striking some spectators seconds before hitting the ground. "It was practically just hacking people. Some managed to duck, but some could not, so arms and heads and pieces of body were just flying off."
At first, many people farther away did not understand what was happening and kept drinking their beer. "It was like standing in front of a screen and watching a film of a plane falling," he said. "You had the sense that it was just a show."
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Rescue crews "sprang into action right away," Dmitri Boguslavsky, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Ministry of Emergency Situations, said by telephone from Kiev, the capital. They were confronted with a grisly triage scenario where they had to determine quickly who could be saved and who could not.
About 10,000 people had turned out for the air show near Lviv, the picturesque center of western Ukraine not far from the Polish border. Singers performed from the stage, families inspected parked planes and vendors sold beer and snacks. Su-27 and MiG-29 jet fighters, propeller planes and gliders were on tap to display their best maneuvers on a clear, sunny day.
In the co*ckpit of the doomed Su-27 were two experienced and capable pilots, according to Sergei Babakov, the duty officer at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. Col. Volodymyr Toponar, the commander of an air unit, and Col. Yuri Yegorov, a top officer in the air force qualification commission, were both rated first-class pilots, Babakov said.
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The deadliest air show accident before today occurred in 1988, when three Italian air force jets collided in midair at Ramstein Air Base in what was then West Germany, killing 70 people on the ground.
Today's crash represented another blow to the reputation of the Ukrainian military, already tarnished when a missile fired during a training exercise last October missed its intended target and instead destroyed a civilian airliner with 78 aboard. Officials initially denied responsibility. Kuchma appeared dismissive even after evidence mounted, saying, "Bigger mistakes have been made." Only after a Russian investigation proved what happened did Ukraine acknowledge culpability.
A Russian-built jet fighter bursts into flames as it crashes into a crowd while performing aerial acrobatics at an air show in Lviv, Ukraine.A rescue worker comforts a victim. "It was like standing in front of a screen and watching a film of a plane falling," one witness said. "Some managed to duck, but some could not."In this television image, a man identified only as one of the two pilots reacts shortly after he ejected from the aircraft.
