Tragic selfie captures final moments before doomed FlyDubai flight

A SELFIE by a passenger who bought a last-minute ticket for Saturday’s doomed FlyDubai flight is among the few things that survived the plane’s fiery crash.

A TRAGIC final selfie by a passenger who bought a last-minute ticket for doomed FlyDubai flight FZ981 is among the few things that has survived the plane’s fiery crash.

Ukrainian beautician Anna Sergeeva had been on the flight from Dubai to Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia when it crashed on impact near the airport on Saturday, killing all 62 people on board.

The 25-year-old is believed to have booked the ticket at the last minute for an impromptu holiday to Rostov-on-Don, Gulf News reports.

She had been living in Dubai for just four months before she was killed.

Sergeeva was dropped off at Dubai airport by Ukrainian Yana Rudi, a colleague at the beauty salon where she worked, and she took a selfie shortly after boarding the ill-fated Boeing 737-800.

Rudi told Gulf News Sergeeva “booked the flight suddenly, without planning”.

Russian emergency crews search the wreckage of the plane, which crashed as it attempted to land at the Rostov-on-Don airport in bad weather on Saturday. Picture: AFP/STR

“She was going for a vacation, to see her friends there. She had worked in Rostov for five years before coming to Dubai,” she said.

“She was a good, decent girl, giving help to everyone.

“We are shocked, troubled, people are crying, everyone who knew her is coming to the salon with flowers.”

A friend, Lera Polyakova, commented on Sergeeva’s selfie post that she was “very energetic, purposeful”.

“When she flew to Dubai to live, it seemed that it was her city, energy,” she said.

“This photo was taken exactly in the plane. No one believes, and we do not believe.”

Four children were among the 62 people killed when the flight FZ981 crashed into the ground in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The plane crashed while making a second attempt to land, after circling for hours in poor weather, according to a statement from the Russian ministry.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has ordered officials to examine whether Russia’s flight safety rules needed to be tightened up after the crash.

Questions have been raised about why the aircraft went ahead with its attempts to land when another jet heading for the same airport a short while earlier had diverted elsewhere because of the bad weather.

The Dubai government said on Twitter that FlyDubai would resume flights from Rostov-on-Don today.

Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said other flights to and from the city had resumed. The airport was closed for a time after the crash.

The charred wreckage of the Boeing jet. Picture: AFP/Vasily Maximov

The plane’s flight data recorder survived largely intact, but the cockpit voice recorder — which should shed light on the pilots’ final conversations — was badly damaged, leading officials to say initially it could take weeks to restore it.

“Memory has already been retrieved from the black boxes, it’s being worked on,” a spokesman of the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), which is investigating the crash, told Reuters.

“The decoding of the two black boxes may take between several weeks and several months.”

There is so far no suggestion of an attack on the aircraft.

Russian media say the two main theories under consideration by investigators are possible pilot error or a technical failure.

FlyDubai’s CEO Ghaith al-Ghaith said on Saturday it was too early to determine why the plane, which was just over five years old, crashed.