RUSSIA: For Bulat Biglov, a brainy 15-year-old boy, it was to be a once-in-a-lifetime treat, an escape from the oil fumes and concrete blocks of Ufa in central Russia to the teenage delights of the Costa Dorada of Spain.
Yesterday his mother wept bitter tears on Russian television after learning that her son and 51 other teenagers and children from the mainly Muslim Russian republic of Bashkortostan had perished when their charter plane collided with a Boeing-757 eight miles above Lake Constance on the German-Swiss border.
"On Sunday we were calm. We thought the children were already splashing in the sea," Ms Biglova cried. But she talked to her son by phone on Monday, surprised to learn that the school prizewinners were still in Moscow, having a whale of a time after missing their original flight to Barcelona.
It was a fatefully cruel twist, but one which left the pupils elated. They toured the sights of the big city, were put up in a hotel, and looked forward to Monday night's flight to Barcelona.
"It was only when we came to work yesterday that we found out that the children were still in Moscow. I phoned. The children were completely happy. They said they had been having a look at everything in Moscow," Ms Biglova said. "If only they had left on time, none of this would have happened." Bashkirian Airlines flight 2937, a Tupolev 154 aircraft which was specially chartered for the school party, was less than half full when it lifted off from Moscow's Domodedovo airport at 22.48 p.m. on Monday.
Capt Alexander Gross (52) and his crew of 11 pitched off into a still and warm Moscow twilight, rising south over the city and heading west with their passenger complement of 52 school pupils, eight of them under the age of eight, the remainder teenagers, and the group's five adult minders.
Mr Dim Khuzhin (38) a civil servant from Ufa who liaises with Unesco, the UN educational trust, was to lead the party booked into the Estival Park hotel on the Costa Dorada. But he was denied a visa by the Spanish embassy in Moscow at the last minute and could not fly.
"All the parents have been calling me all morning," he said. "It was very difficult to talk to them. All I could say to them was 'yes, I was escorting your children. Yes, I took your children to the border control at the airport'."
"These were our best pupils," Mr Khuzhin said. "The children who won our school olympics."
Ufa is a grimy, Soviet-style centre of Russia's oil refining industry 900 miles east of Moscow run by the authoritarian president of Bashkortostan, Mr Murtaza Rakhimov. At least half of the prizewinning pupils were the offspring of local civil servants, although reports that these were the pampered kids of the wealthy government and business elite appear wide of the mark.
Most of the parents knew nothing about the tragedy until they showed up at work in the government offices in Ufa yesterday morning. "The parents were all at their jobs," said a secretary in the prime minister's office, who asked not to be named. "I know them all, I've worked with them for years. Most lost one child, but some lost two. You can understand what kind of state they are in. Most of them found out about the deaths of their children here from the radio."
President Rakhimov declared three days of mourning in Bashkortostan.