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Fire Scare as Jet Carrying 297 Lands in Siberia

A Nordwind Airlines Boeing 767 at Sheremetyevo Airport.

Nearly 300 passengers on board a charter flight operated by Nordwind Airlines have escaped without injury after the jet's chassis caught fire during landing at the Krasnoyarsk airport.

A towing crew was the first to spot that the left side of the Boeing 767 had caught fire after it landed around 9:45 p.m. Tuesday, regional transportation prosecutors said. The blaze apparently started as the plane braked on landing at Emelyanovo airport on its arrival from Bangkok.

The flames were quickly put out by the towing crew, and all 285 passengers were unharmed.

"No one was injured, and the aircraft was not damaged," transportation prosecutors said in a statement.

The plane also was carrying a crew of two pilots and 10 flight attendants and 4,098 kilograms of luggage, the statement said.

Regional transportation prosecutors have opened a check into whether safety procedures were followed.

The plane, meanwhile, was being readied for a flight to Phuket, Thailand.

Nordwind Airlines, founded in 2008 by the Russian and Turkish divisions of the tour operator Pegasus, is a charter airline based at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. It operates a fleet of about 20, mainly Boeing aircraft.

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