MOSCOW — Forty-one people were killed on Sunday when a Russian passenger jet made an emergency landing at a Moscow airport, trailing a gigantic plume of flame and black smoke and skidding to a stop on fire.

A Russian law enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee, reported that 40 passengers and one crew member lost their lives. There were 78 people on the plane.

Videos showed passengers who had escaped the aircraft on exit slides running away from the burning plane on the tarmac as travelers inside the Sheremetyevo airport looked on aghast.

[Update: In Russian plane crash, investigators look at pilot error, equipment failure and weather.]

“We were witnesses to this horror,” one woman, Alena Osokina, told Russia’s Dozhd television station.