ANADYR UGOLNY AIRPORT – Air China Flight CA983 from Beijing to Los Angeles – carrying 188 passengers – made an emergency landing in Siberia Tuesday morning, due to a fire alarm that went off. All passengers and crew of CA983 were evacuated safely by inflatable slides at Anadyr Ugolny airport which serves Russia’s easternmost town Anadyr in the subarctic district of Chukotka.

The Boeing 777-39L(ER) – with registration B-2040 – took off from Beijing at 9:13 PM on Monday and landed at Anadyr at 2:55 AM.
The emergency landing was triggered by a fire alarm that went off in the aircraft’s cargo compartment as it was flying above Russia, Air China said in an apology on Weibo on Tuesday.

Passengers had to evacuate the B777 during ice cold weather conditions at the Siberian Airport. Left hand slides turned out to be unusable when high winds blew them out of position. Passengers were transferred to the terminal while they waited for another plane to fly them to their destination.

A check of the Boeing 777 suggested a malfunction in the alarm system as no sign of fire could be found, the company said.

Anadyr Ugolny Airport (DYR) is a mixed-use military and civil airfield in Siberia located 11 km east of Anadyr, separated from the town by the waters of Anadyrsky Liman. The airfield was originally constructed sometime in the 1950s as a staging base for Long Range Aviation bombers such as the Tupolev Tu-95 and Tupolev Tu-22M, but during the Cold War years it become the primary hub for civilian flights in the Chukotka region.

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(Top photo Air China B777 B-2040: John Taggart from Sunbury on Thames, Middlesex [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boeing_777-300_(Air_China)B-2040_LHR(12097547006).jpg)

(*Anadyr Ugolny Airport photo: Dzerod at Russian Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anadyr-Ugolny-August2006.jpg)