China plane crashes after overshooting runway
BEIJING (Reuters) - A passenger plane overshot a runway on landing at a new airport in northeast China late on Tuesday, bursting into flames and killing 43 people in the nation's worst air disaster in years.
The accident will be a jolt for China's fast-growing air sector, which has escaped disaster recently thanks to stricter safety rules and relatively young fleets. Xinhua said Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, the most senior official overseeing safety issues, was headed to the scene of the accident.
The Henan Airlines plane crashed at 10.10 pm (3:10 p.m. British time) in Yichun, a small city in Heilongjiang province, after flying from Harbin, the province's capital, state media said.
Yichun has a small domestic airport which only opened last year, and is one of an increasing number of airports built in remote parts of China to help boost economic development.
The bodies of 43 people killed in the accident had already been found at the site, city official Jin Yi told the China News Service. Chinese state television put the official death toll at 42.
The other 53 people on board "have all been taken to hospital for treatment, and at present none is in danger of loss of life," the report said, citing Jin. Their injuries included burns, cuts and broken limbs.
The Communist Party chief of Yichun, Xu Zhaojun, told Xinhua that the crew of the plane had reporting nothing amiss before the attempted landing.
"The airplane personnel contacted the ground staff to say they could see the landing lights and requested a normal landing," Xinhua cited Xu as saying.
By daylight on Wednesday police had sealed off the scene of twisted and burnt wreckage and the bodies of the dead were wrapped in body bags, waiting to be taken to a morgue, said Xinhua.
There were 91 passengers, including five children, as well five crew members on board the ERJ-190, built by Brazil's Embraer, said the China News Service.
Technicians from Embraer, the world's largest maker of regional jets, flew on Tuesday to China to investigate the crash. Embraer shares tumbled 3.9 percent to 10.42 reais in Sao Paulo.
Henan Airlines is a small regional carrier controlled by Shenzhen Airlines, itself part-owned by Air China. The airline is based in Henan, a province in central China and changed its name from Kunpeng Airlines earlier this year.
The number of airline passengers in China grew from 67.2 million trips in 2000 to 230.5 million in 2009, according to government statistics.
China's last major civilian aircraft crash was in 2004, when a CRJ200 operated by China Eastern Airlines came down in a frozen lake in northern Inner Mongolia shortly after take-off, killing more than 50 people.
In 2002, a China Northern flight from Beijing to the port city of Dalian fell into the sea, killing 112 people, after the pilot reported a fire in the cabin. and flies only domestic routes using the Brazilian-made Embraer.
(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard, Liu Zhen and Sally Huang in Beijing; Alison Leung and James Pomfret in Hong Kong; Guillermo Parra-Bernal in Sao Paulo; Editing by David Fox)