Beijing, China (News Today) - Work crews pored Wednesday over the site in northwest China where a passenger jet overshot a runway and crashed Tuesday, breaking into two pieces, bursting into flames and killing 43 of the 96 people aboard.
Their initial focus was to find the cockpit voice recorder and cockpit data recorder -- the so-called black boxes -- that might yield clues as to what caused the Brazilian-made Embraer 190 jet to crash land in heavy fog on a patch of grass about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) from the runway.
Some passengers were thrown from the plane upon impact, said the state-run Xinhua news agency, which cited the head of the publicity department of the Yichun city committee of the Communist Party of China.
Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang led a team of transportation, health, work safety, and security officials to Yichun overnight, Xinhua said.
Two survivors told local television that the plane shook violently before it crashed and that thick smoke entered the cabin soon after impact. They said passengers were unable to open emergency exits after the wreck; survivors escaped through cracks in the fuselage.
The plane was carrying 91 passengers, including five children, and five crew members when it crashed at 9:36 p.m. (9:36 a.m. ET), according to Xinhua, which cited a source with the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
The Henan Airlines flight had taken off from Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, on the 360-kilometer (225-mile) flight to Lindu Airport, about 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) from downtown Yichun, a city of about 1 million residents near the Russian border, Xinhua said.
A Yichun vice-mayor told Xinhua that most of those taken to hospitals did not have life-threatening injuries.
China's last fatal passenger airline accident occurred in November 2004, when a China Eastern commuter jet took off in frigid Inner Mongolia without de-icing and crashed shortly afterward into a nearby park, killing 55 people.
Source : CNN
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Investigation begins into cause of jet crash in China
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