Pyramiden

On 29 August 1996 at 10:22:23 CET Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801, crashed straight into a mountain, while on approach to land at Longyaerbyen, Svalbard. All 141 people aboard were killed, making it the deadliest aviation accident ever in Norway. The aircraft was chartered by Arktikugol, a Russian state owned coal mining company, to fly Russian and Ukrainian workers to the mining town of Pyramiden. The accident was a major contributing cause for Arktikugol’s total closure of the entire town two years later, when the settlement was rapidly evacuated and left totally abandoned. The arctic climate has preserved the site, slowly turning it into a ghost town frozen in time. This book is a photo documentation of Pyramiden in the state it was in 2011.