UTAir flight with 109 passengers on board returned Moscow following an incident.
The Boeing-737-500 was forced to return back to the ground only 40 minutes after take-off..
The aircraft was experiencing a fault with the airliner’s wing flaps.
The flight returned to Vnukovo airport in Moscow.
But unbeknownst to the passengers – the plane was also carrying some 19kg of radioactive material.
It was shipping the potentially deadly cargo to Khanty-Mansiysk in western Siberia.
Russian media reported the “dangerous cargo” was not damaged during the unscheduled and sudden descent by the plane. The radioactive material had been given special permission to be transported on the flight by the Kremlin.
Khanty-Mansiysk is the capital of the Khanty-Mansi region – which during the 1980s hosted underground Soviet nuclear tests.