Maybe the Paris air show distracted attention from the Tupolev Tu-134 crash at Petrozavodsk in June. Maybe there was a collective weary shrug, a resigned attitude of "this is Russia", or perhaps the loss of 40-odd people on a chartered Soviet jet did not meet some notional threshold for a major disaster. Or perhaps it was that those people did not have an international following like the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl ice-hockey team.
Anyone who remembers the exchange of table-tennis teams between the USA and China in the 1970s - ping-pong diplomacy, it was branded - and the rapt attention on the US-Iran football match during the World Cup in 1998 is aware of sport's potential to influence higher political echelons.
That influence might just be generating the political momentum needed to improve Russia's air transport safety record, because the Lokomotiv disaster - already a hammer-blow to national pride - was lent further bitterness by the death of Alexander Galimov, the only member of the team to have emerged alive from the crash. And the government knows it.
Lokomotiv is one of the highest-profile squads to be lost. There have been comparisons to the 1958 Munich air crash that killed eight Manchester United footballers. If people talk about Yaroslavl in 50 years, like they talk about Munich, maybe they will remember it for not just who was lost, but what was won.
Source: Flight International
