Damir Yusupov, captain of the A321 passenger plane operated by Ural Airlines, which made an emergency landing in the Moscow Region on Thursday, has said that he was trying to rescue the plane, passengers and crew during the emergency.

Axar.az reports citing Russian media.

"Many say that [I am] a hero, but, frankly speaking, I don’t feel like a hero at all, because I did what I had to do, that is, rescue the plane, passengers and crew," he told the Sixty Minutes program broadcast by the Rossiya 1 TV channel.

He noted that the crew had followed instructions. "We were ready for that from the moral and professional standpoint. We have our own simulator in Yekaterinburg, our own school for training flight crews. I believe we managed to land the plane successfully, without serious damage to passengers, thanks to that, thanks to these skills," Yusupov claimed.

The pilots were able to take a sigh of relief when the senior cabin attendant entered the cockpit and said that everyone had been evacuated and no one was killed, he went on to say. "Of course, I felt greatly relieved that everything was more or less OK. Later on, after the passengers had been evacuated, I walked out of the cockpit, examined the visible damage, made sure that all the passengers were at a safe distance, returned to the cockpit and called my wife from there," Yusupov noted.