MOSCOW – A Ural Airlines Airbus A321 packed with tourists made a terrifying emergency landing in a cornfield on Thursday morning. The aircraft, with 234 passengers on board, had just taken off from Moscow’s Zhukovsky Airport, when it flew into a flock of birds.

According to Ural Airlines, Flight U6178 landed in a cornfield just a few miles from the airport, after the A321-100 (reg. VQ-BOZ) suffered a dual bird strike, causing one engine to fail and the other engine emitting noises as if the engine was spooling up and down, forcing the pilots to stop the climb immediately and look for a place to make an emergency landing with the landing gear retracted.

A passenger filmed the emergency landing. You can clearly hear both engines having serious problems following a loud bang when birds were ingested into both engines.

Although there is some panic at first, the passengers quietly leave the aircraft via the emergency slides after the crash landing.

There were 10 injuries, including 3 children.

US Airways Flight 1549

A similar incident occured on January 15, 2009 in New York, when Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River off Midtown Manhattan, after both engines were disabled by a bird strike; all 155 people aboard survived the crash landing and were rescued by nearby boats, and there were few serious injuries.

The major difference between these both emergency landings are that the Ural A321 crash landed on a field, while the US Airways A320 crash landed on a river.

Nevertheless, both pilots stayed calm and did one hell of a job by landing these planes in terrifying conditions.

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(Head Image: from Sputnik video)