Russian emergency workers have recovered 41 bodies and two flight recorders from the wreckage of a plane that caught fire during an emergency landing in Moscow, officials said Monday as they sought to discover the cause of the disaster.

Transport Minister Yevgeny Dietrich gave the death toll and said six of the survivors had been hospitalized. The plane, an Aeroflot SSJ100, was carrying 78 people, including five crew members.

The plane caught fire Sunday evening about 6:30 p.m. as it came down hard on the runway at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport after turning back from a flight destined for Murmansk. The landing occurred about a half hour after takeoff, indicating that the plane had little time to dump its fuel.

Videos showed desperate passengers hurrying down emergency slides deployed from the plane's forward section as black smoke billowed.

One of the dead was flight attendant Maxim Moiseev, Dietrich said. Russian news reports, citing unnamed sources, said the Moiseev was in the back part of the plane, which was engulfed in flames and tried unsuccessfully to deploy an evacuation slide.

Russia's main investigative body said both of the plane's flight recorders — data and voice — have been recovered. Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko was also quoted by Russian news agencies on Monday as saying that investigators were looking into three main possibilities behind the cause of the disaster: inexperienced pilots, equipment failure and bad weather.

Storms were passing through the Moscow area as when the plane made its emergency landing. The reason why the pilots decided to make an emergency landing has not been announced.

Video showed desperate passengers leaping out of the plane onto inflatable evacuation slides and staggering across the airport's tarmac and grass, some holding luggage.

The airport said in a statement that the plane, which had taken off from Sheremetyevo Airport for the northern city of Murmansk, turned back for unspecified technical reasons and made a hard landing that started the fire.

Video broadcast later on Russian television showed flames bursting from the jetliner's underside as it lands and then bounces. The plane apparently did not have time to jettison fuel before the emergency landing, news reports said.

The SSJ100, also known as the Superjet, is a two-engine regional jet put into service in 2011 with considerable fanfare as a signal that Russia's troubled aerospace industry was on the rise.

However, the plane's reputation was troubled after defects were found in some horizontal stabilizers.

The plane's manufacturer, Sukhoi Civil Aircraft, said the plane in Sunday's accident had received maintenance at the beginning of April. Aeroflot said the pilot had some 1,400 hours of experience flying the plane.

The plane is largely used in Russia as a replacement for outdated Soviet-era aircraft, but also has been used by airlines in other countries, including Armenia and Mexico.

This is the second fatal accident involving a SSJ100. In 2012, a demonstration flight in Indonesia struck a mountain, killing all 45 aboard.