Sukha Balka, Ukraine ? Pulkovo Airlines Flight 612 was packed with families, tourists and others returning to the Russian city of St. Petersburg after soaking up the sun and salt water on the Black Sea.

Thunderstorms roiled the air space over eastern Ukraine and the pilots of the Tu-154 passenger jet chose to steer higher to avoid the turbulence.

Then something went wrong. The crew sent distress signals. And shortly thereafter, the plane fell to the earth, in the words of one eyewitness, “like a petal.”

Ukrainian and Russian emergency officials picked through smoldering wreckage, shredded metal and plastic and the remains of 170 passengers and crew Tuesday, trying to make sense out of the third passenger plane crash involving Russia’s aviation industry this year.

“Nobody survived,” Mykhaylo Korsakov, spokesman for the Donetsk department of the Emergency Situations Ministry, told The Associated Press.

Authorities ruled out terrorism. Ukrainian officials said a storm, accompanied by heavy winds, driving rain and flashes of lightning, was raging through the region at the time.

Korsakov said the pilot asked to make an emergency landing before disappearing from the radar screens at around 2:30 p.m.

Firefighters work at the crash site Tuesday of a Russian aircraft that was traveling from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa to St. Petersburg. The crash occurred near the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, about 400 miles east of Kiev. The plane crashed just minutes after sending an SOS message, and all 170 people on board were killed, Russian emergency officials said.

The plane was en route from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa – a holiday destination popular with families – to St. Petersburg when it ran into trouble. Two minutes after the crew sent a distress signal, it dropped off the radar, said Russian emergency official Yulia Stadnikova.

Residents of Sukha Balka, a village north of Donetsk and some 400 miles east of Kiev, found part of the plane’s tail section and still-burning pieces of debris in a swampy field. Television footage showed scorched, smoldering land covered in small pieces of wreckage. Thick white smoke hung over the debris.

Of the 170 people on board, 45 were children, Pulkovo Airlines deputy director Anatoly Samoshin told reporters at the St. Petersburg airport. The list of passengers, most of whom were from St. Petersburg, appeared to include many families.

Investigators were searching for the flight data recorders commonly called black boxes.

Samoshin said the pilot decided to climb about 3,300 feet to try to get above the storm. But as the plane ascended from 29,500 to 36,000 feet, the pilot sent the first distress signal.