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43 Dead In China Plane Crash: State Media
BEIJING - A Chinese passenger plane crashed and burst into flames while attempting to land in northeast China on Tuesday, killing 43 people on board, state media reported.
The Henan Airlines plane overshot the runway while trying to touch down at an airport in the city of Yichun in remote Heilongjiang province, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Hua Jingwei, an official with the Communist Party in Yichun, told Xinhua that 43 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage and 53 survivors taken to hospital for treatment.
Hua said the plane broke into two pieces as it approached the runway, Xinhua reported, and some passengers were thrown out of the cabin before the jet hit the ground.
There were 91 passengers, including five children, and five crew on board, Xinhua said, citing a source at the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).
The crash occurred shortly after 9:30 pm (1330 GMT) near Yichun's Lindu airport, around 40 minutes after the plane took off from Harbin, the provincial capital, Xinhua said.
Television images showed teams of firefighters using hoses to douse the blazing wreckage of the aircraft.
Wang Xuemei, the vice mayor of Yichun who oversaw the rescue efforts, said most of the survivors taken to hospital had suffered broken bones.
The aircraft was an E-190 jet, a passenger aircraft manufactured by Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Embraer.
A spokesman for the constructor said the company did not yet have "an official position" on the accident.
The cause of the crash was still unclear and work teams searched through the wreckage for the plane's black box flight data recorder.
Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang led a team of transport, safety and security officials to Yichun to deal with the aftermath of the crash and begin investigation work, Xinhua said.
The CAAC has also sent a 20-strong group of technicians and officials to the scene, it said.
Lindu airport is in a forest around nine kilometres (five miles) outside of central Yichun, a city of one million inhabitants around 150 kilometres from the border with Russia.
Henan Airlines, based in the central province of the same name, launched the Yichun-Harbin service a year ago and operated the route three times a week, Xinhua said.
The carrier was previously known as Kunpeng Airlines and is run by Shenzhen Airlines, based in the southern city of the same name.
The crash came a week after a North Korean military aircraft came down on a house in Liaoning province, also in China's northeast, killing the pilot.
