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Wheel close call. Shocking video captures the moment a plane’s landing gear collapsed, causing it to skid off the runway toward a gas station in a shower of sparks. The Russian Antonov An-24

turboprop plane was trying to land in the Siberian town of Irkutsk on Monday with 46 passengers and five crew members on board when the front wheel dramatically snapped off, according to

local reports. Heart-stopping security footage from the airport in the Irkutsk region of Russia shows the Angara Airlines plane skidding out of control, sending sparks flying into the sky as

the fuselage scrapes along the runway. As the plane veered off the runway, it appeared to be heading directly toward a gas station just next to the airport, passengers said. EXPLORE MORE “A

sharp nose-down tilt, a jolt, and then a grinding noise as the metal fuselage scraped along the asphalt.  “I looked out the window and saw sparks burst out from under the front of the

aircraft. Women and children were screaming ‘Mother!’ out of fear,” one passenger, Marina Sinkova, told local outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda. As the aircraft turned sharply down, passengers

felt “a jolt, and then a grinding noise as the metal fuselage scraped along the asphalt,” she added. “When it became clear what was happening, there was only one thought in my head, ‘Please

don’t let the plane crash into the petrol station’. Then, when I looked out of the window again, the plane stopped. There was grass around. Thank goodness it was over. We’re alive!” Sinkova

said. The Antonov An-24, a Soviet-era plane designed in the 1950s, has one of the worst flight safety records in the world. It has been involved in 159 crashes resulting in more than 2,000

fatalities since coming into service in 1957, official records show. Later footage shows the plane nose-down in the grass after an emergency evacuation was ordered for the passengers and

crew. The plane had been making the brief one-hour 40-minute flight from Irkutsk when its nose gear collapsed, the East Siberian Transport Prosecutor’s Office, which is investigating the

incident, said in a statement. Remarkably, no serious injuries were reported among the passengers or crew on board. The event was classified as a serious aviation incident, and the airport

was closed for a day while Rosaviatsia, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, launched its investigation. The airport reopened on Tuesday.