- Fifteen years ago today, the plane carrying Lokomotiv Yaroslavl crashed on takeoff outside the city
- Forty-four of the 45 people on board died, including former NHLers Pavol Demitra, Ruslan Salei and Brad McCrimmon
- Read below for how the hockey world responded and where Lokomotiv stands 15 years later
Fifteen years ago today, an entire hockey team died on a riverbank outside Yaroslavl.
IIHF president Rene Fasel was asked to put the September 7, 2011 crash into words within hours of it happening, and he did not reach for anything softer.
“This is the darkest day in the history of our sport,” Fasel said that afternoon.
Our tribute Monday leaned on a team photo from Arena 2000, the whole group lined up on the ice under the Lokomotiv scoreboard:
The Yak-42 ran past the end of the runway at Tunoshna Airport before it got airborne, clipped an antenna mast and came down near the Volga about two kilometers away. Flight mechanic Alexander Sizov was the only person on board who lived. Winger Alexander Galimov was pulled from the wreckage alive and died five days later in Moscow.
That flight was headed to Minsk for the KHL season opener against Dinamo Minsk. Nearly the entire organization was on it, a roster and staff drawn from ten countries.
Demitra, Salei, Karel Rachunek, Josef Vasicek, Alexander Vasyunov and Karlis Skrastins had all played in the NHL. So had the three men running the bench: head coach Brad McCrimmon, in his first job as a KHL boss, and assistants Igor Korolev and Alexander Karpovtsev, one of the first four Russians to get his name on the Stanley Cup with the 1994 Rangers.
Investigators later found the crew miscalculated the takeoff speed and that one pilot had his feet resting on the brake pedals during the roll. Neither man had the training to fly the aircraft.
The night after the crash, Dinamo Minsk turned the arena where Lokomotiv was supposed to play into a funeral, with 37 portraits laid out on the ice. Take a look at how the fans there said goodbye:
Weeks later it came out that winger Ivan Tkachenko had quietly given close to 10 million rubles to sick children over his final four years, including a 500,000-ruble transfer the day before he died. He never told anyone.
NHL clubs carried the names all season. Detroit wore a patch for Salei, McCrimmon and Stefan Liv, New Jersey wore one for Rachunek and Vasyunov, Carolina wore one for Vasicek, and Dallas put Skrastins’ No. 37 on its helmets. The Blues held a ceremony for Demitra and Korolev that November.
Lokomotiv sat out the 2011-12 KHL season and rebuilt in the second-tier VHL before returning the following year. The club won its first Gagarin Cup in 2025, repeated in 2026 and now wears gold as the defending champion.
A decade and a half after the crash, the club from Yaroslavl is the best team in the KHL.
