Real Sports: Despite Lokomotiv tragedy, Russian hockey teams still using second-rate planes

Saturday afternoon, NBC showed a terrific documentary, Lokomotiv, on a Russia town’s efforts to rebuild after a plane crash that killed players and coaches in 2011.

Tuesday, the latest edition of HBO’s Real Sports (10 p.m. ET) has a follow-up from Bernard Goldberg that suggests the tragedy could happen again.

Here’s a clip:

The write-up from HBO:

Hockey’s Darkest Day. On Sept. 7, 2011, Russia’s Lokomotiv, one of the premier hockey teams in the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), boarded a Soviet-era Yak-42 jet at a Yaroslavl airport to travel to a game in Minsk, the capital of Belarus. A few moments after lift-off, the chartered aircraft crashed about 500 yards from the runway, instantly killing 43 of the 45 passengers, including several NHL and Olympic Games veterans. The model of the aircraft carrying the team had a long history of problems and the charter company has one of the worst air safety records in the world. Now, two years after the worst aviation disaster in professional sports history, REAL SPORTS/Sports Illustrated revisits the families and officials who were interviewed in HBO’s original segment in 2012 and correspondent Bernard Goldberg learns more about the latest developments in the KHL’s aviation safety protocol. New interviews include Bethann Salei, whose husband Ruslan Salei, a former NHL player, was killed in the 2011 crash and KHL vice president Ilya Kochevrin.