At least 41 people on board a Russian Aeroflot plane were killed on Sunday when the aircraft caught fire as it made an emergency landing at a Moscow airport.

Wire service reports sayd the aircraft, a Sukhoi Superjet 100, bounced along the tarmac at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport before the rear part of the plane suddenly burst into flames.

Some passengers on board the flight managed to escape by using the plane's emergency slides. But many weren't so lucky.

The CBC reports that Russian officials said the plane, which had been flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of Murmansk, had been carrying 73 passengers and five crew members.

Svetlana Petrenko, a spokesperson for Russia's Investigative Committee, said in a statement that only 37 out of 78 people on board had survived, meaning 41 people had lost their lives.

The commitee Committee said it an investigation had begun and that it was looking into whether pilots had violated air safety rules.

Some passengers blamed bad weather and lightning, according to the CBC.

"We took off and then lightning struck the plane," the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily cited one surviving passenger, Pyotr Egorov, as saying.

"The plane turned back and there was a hard landing. We were so scared, we almost lost consciousness. The plane jumped down the landing strip like a grasshopper and then caught fire on the ground."