MOSCOW: In other countries, you may be asked to give a push to a car stuck in the mud. In Russia, passengers in the Arctic came out of an airliner in sub-zero temperatures to help it move to the runway.

A Russian-made Tu-134 with 74 oil workers and seven crewmembers aboard was due to fly from the town of Igarka on Tuesday to Krasnoyarsk, about 1,300km to the south, when the plane froze to the ground. It was -52 C outside and the passengers seemed desperate to get home.

Eager to help, several dozen men were seen in an amateur video pushing the plane by leaning on both wings.

The extraordinary story emerged on Wednesday after a passenger posted the video on YouTube. “Let’s go,” passengers in thick winter coats shout and whoop as they grab the wings of the plane and shove it several metres along the runway.

“Everyone wants to go home,” one man says. Transport prosecutors in western Siberia said they were investigating the incident.

“Due to the low air temperatures, the chassis’s brake system froze and a tow truck was unable to move the plane onto the taxiway to carry out the flight,” prosecutors said in a statement. “The passengers on board got out of the plane and started pushing it onto the taxiway.”

The technical director of Krasnoyarsk-based Katekavia, Vladimir Artyomenko, told the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily that the plane had been immobilised because the pilots forgot to take off the parking brake when they left the plane.

“That caused the brake pads to freeze up,” he said.

Passengers pushed the plane until it was able to turn and then the tow truck took over, he said. The flight then took off and went smoothly. Showing that extreme weather is nothing unusual in Siberia, an Igarka airport worker commented to the popular Komsomolskaya Pravda daily that it was a cold day and the flights would have been cancelled if temperatures had fallen another two degrees. Even for Russians inured to long winters of sub-zero temperatures, the passengers’ can-do chutzpah has drawn awed admiration. “Siberians are so tough that for them pushing a frozen plane along a runway is a piece of cake,” said Komsomolskaya Pravda.

The pilot “probably wouldn’t have asked normal commercial passengers, but oil workers are normal, down-to-earth types, they all know each other. So he said: ‘Come and help out if we want to take off’,” test pilot Vadim Bazykin told Rosbalt news agency.

Social media too was abuzz with praise for the passengers.

The prosecutors, however, warned that the stunt could have been dangerous. “They were pushing the plane as if it was a car that lost traction, which you categorically should not do due to the danger of damaging the skin of the fuselage,” said Oksana Gorbunova, an aide to transport prosecutors, cited by Interfax news agency.

Published in Dawn, November 27th , 2014