LVIV, Ukraine — The bright sun lighting their grim faces, hundreds of family members and survivors gathered Monday for a memorial ceremony on the charred Ukrainian airstrip where a military jet plowed into air-show spectators, killing at least 83.
As investigators sought to determine who was to blame, Ukraine's air force commander and a top officer had been detained, the Su-27's two pilots were under investigation and the country's defense minister submitted his resignation. Two main causes were being considered — pilot carelessness or mechanical failure of the 15-year-old plane.
All of Ukraine, a France-size former Soviet republic of 50 million people, held a day of mourning Monday for the victims of Saturday's crash, the world's deadliest air show accident. Television stations canceled entertainment programming and black ribbons were tied around flagpoles in the capital, Kiev.
Officials at the mayor's office in the western city of Lviv said a total of 83 people had been killed, including 23 children, and 116 people were injured, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry. Seventy-two bodies had been identified by Monday morning.
The first funerals were Monday. Relatives of the dead and spectators who survived the disaster, clutching carnations and handkerchiefs, streamed Monday into the Sknyliv air base for a brief memorial ceremony led by Ukrainian Orthodox clerics singing songs and reading prayers. One woman held a candle.
Flowers were strewn around the singed turf where the fighter jet exploded in a huge ball of fire. The site was cordoned off by security officials.
The jet had been performing a risky maneuver at low altitude when it nicked the ground, sliced off the nose of a plane on the ground and roared through a crowd of hundreds of spectators. The pilots catapulted and survived.
"The plane started killing people as it was coming in," said Ivan Kravchenko, who saw the crash from about 50 yards away. "I thought, 'It's flying too low over people. This is not a good stunt."'
He said his grandson, 4-year-old Vitaly, asked him later, "Grandpa, is that what's supposed to happen?"
Raisa Volodymyrova was standing next to the Il-76MD that was clipped by the Su-27.
"There were piles and piles of people around me. There was a body of a child lying on me," she recalled tearfully at Monday's ceremony.
At a chapel next door to Lviv's central morgue, where refrigerated trucks continued delivering bodies, a service was held for Oleh Scherdynyn, who was watching the show with four friends and was to be married soon.
His mother was overcome by grief and left 15 minutes into the Greek Catholic service in the dilapidated, dim church. A young female relative fainted.
The accident was the latest blow for Ukraine's cash-starved military.
Defense Minister Vladimir Shkidchenko submitted his resignation Sunday, which was being considered by President Leonid Kuchma. Shkidchenko's predecessor was fired after a Ukrainian missile accidentally downed a Russian passenger jet over the Black Sea.
Air Force Commander Gen. Col. Vladimir Strelnikov and Lt. Col. S. Opyshchak were fired by Kuchma and detained on suspicion of "negligent attitude to military service that led to grave consequences," the Prosecutor General's Office said. Kuchma also fired the chief of the general staff.
A court will decide whether to arrest the two pilots after they recover from their injuries, prosecutors said.
Former Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk said he warned about Ukraine's outdated military equipment at a Security Council meeting a day before the crash, the Interfax news agency reported.
Anatoly Kvochur, the top pilot for the Su-27 test flight program during Soviet times and a frequent performer at international air shows, was quoted by Russia's Kommersant newspaper as saying: "In Ukraine, as in Russia, flights are conducted irregularly, the equipment gets stale and often the human factor can bring about a tragedy."
Meanwhile in Moscow, authorities examined flight data recorders from the wreckage of a wide-bodied Russian jet that slammed into a forest outside Moscow just after taking off, killing 14 crew members. Two flight attendants survived the crash.
The Pulkovo airlines Il-86 passenger jet was returning to its home airport in St. Petersburg after a flight from the Black Sea resort of Sochi when it crashed Sunday, just after taking off from Sheremetyevo-1 airport. The pilots did not have time to tell controllers there was a problem, aviation officials said. Only the crew was aboard.
The plane hit the ground so hard that its front section was unrecognizable amid the blackened wreckage except for a wall of fuselage. Two flight attendants who were in the tail section survived the crash — one with minor injuries while the other was in serious but stable condition at a Moscow hospital, officials said.