MOSCOW — A Russian airliner carrying around 20 passengers and six crew members disappeared from radar on Tuesday on the Far Eastern peninsula of Kamchatka, local officials said. The plane, a Soviet-designed Antonov AN-26, was flying from the regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski to the small coastal town of Palana when it stopped transmitting, Valentina Glazova, a spokeswoman for the regional transport prosecutor's office, told AFP. She said the plane was carrying 23 passengers and six crew members, with Russian news agencies quoting local officials saying 28 people including six crew members were on board. Search and rescue efforts are under way, Glazova added. All we know at the moment is that contact with the plane has been lost and it has not landed. Two helicopters have been mobilized to search for the plane, which various sources said to Russian media may have crashed into the sea or onto the ground near a coal mine near Palana. Russia has long suffered from a poor reputation for aviation safety, with instances of poor technical maintenance and lax safety regulations. The last serious accident was in May 2019 when a Sukhoi Superjet belonging to the national airline Aeroflot was forced to land and caught fire on the runway of a Moscow airport, killing 41 people. In February 2018, a Saratov Airlines AN-148 crashed shortly after takeoff near Moscow, killing all 71 people on board. An investigation determined that human error was the cause of the accident. Air transport is also subject to often difficult flying conditions in remote areas of the Arctic and the Far East. — Euronews