The Boeing 737-500 plane was on an internal flight from Moscow. It ploughed into wasteland while trying to land in the city of Perm.

Small pieces of debris covered a section of Russia?s main east-west railway, forcing its closure, Russian media reported.

Television showed fire fighters walking around the smoldering, shattered remains of the plane. One of the only recognizable pieces of the aircraft was a white fuselage panel showing the logo of Aeroflot, Russia?s national carrier.Investigators have found two recording boxes from the crash site which they hoped will reveal why the 16-year-old Boeing crashed. There was no suggestion of an attack or sabotage.

?There were 88 people on board, 82 passengers and six crew,? said Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman Irina Andrianova.

?All of them died. There were no casualties on the ground.?

Aeroflot said 21 foreign nationals were among those killed ? nine from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine and one person each from France, Switzerland, Latvia, the United States, Germany, Turkey and Italy.

Seven children died in the crash and Russian news agencies said one of the dead was General Gennady Troshev who in 2000 commanded the Russian army against rebels in the north Caucasus region of Chechnya.

Russian aviation had been trying to shake off its patchy safety record and Sunday?s accident was the worst crash involving a Russian airliner since at least 170 people died in August 2006 when a TU-154 plane crashed in Ukraine on a flight from the Black Sea resort of Anapa to St Petersburg.

Contact lost

Contact with the airliner was lost when it was at an altitude of 1,100 meters (3,600 ft) while descending to land, said an Aeroflot spokeswoman.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was briefed about the crash by Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu, news agencies quoted the Kremlin press service as saying.

Aeroflot, a debt-ridden airline in the 1990s when it had a fleet of mainly Soviet-built planes, has transformed itself into an image conscious, profit-making company with global ambitions.

The company immediately said it would pay compensation of 2 million roubles ($77,800) to relatives of the dead and made plans to fly family members from Moscow to Perm.The last Aeroflot plane crash occurred in March 1994 in Siberia when 70 people were killed. Investigators found that the pilot?s teenage son had been allowed to enter the flight cabin and had accidentally switched off the autopilot.

Last month, at least 65 people were killed when a Boeing 737-200 crashed in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian country that was once part of the Soviet Union.