A CHINA Northern Airlines plane carrying 112 passengers and crew has crashed into the sea off the coast of northeast China, with all on board feared dead, officials and state media said on Wednesday.
”No survivors have been found,” said an official at Dalian airport who was in charge of dealing with relatives of the passengers on the ill-fated flight, which crashed late on Tuesday.
The official said that bodies salvaged from the sea were placed at various hospitals throughout the city, and that identification had not yet begun.
More than 70 bodies and various items of wreckage were pulled from the water within hours of the crash, the China News Service reported.
The official Xinhua news agency said there was little hope anyone would now be found alive.
The pilot of flight 6136 from Beijing to Dalian in Liaoning province reported a fire in the cabin of his MD-82 jet just before he was due to land in the coastal city, 500 kilometres northeast of the Chinese capital.
Soon afterwards witnesses saw a passenger plane circling briefly before plunging into Dalian Bay.
”All we know is the rear part of the cabin caught fire,” said a China Northern Airlines official in charge of assisting passengers’ relatives.
”At around 9:10 pm (1310 GMT), the pilot had contact with the control tower. Less than two minutes later, he lost contact,” said the official, who declined to give his name.
”The last thing the pilot said was: ‘The tail is on fire’, and then the signal was gone.”
Dozens of boats began combing the dark waters soon after the twin-engined mid-sized plane went down close to 9:40 pm (1340 GMT), around 10 kilometres from Dalian.
As well as the bodies, rescue workers recovered a food trolley which had been burned black and was broken into two pieces, ”which indicates the seriousness of the fire”, Xinhua said.
”The rescue work is still underway, but it is estimated that there is little hope of any survivors,” the agency said.
President Jiang Zemin immediately ordered an urgent investigation into the crash — the second major accident involving a Chinese airline in little more than three weeks.
On April 15, 129 people died when an Air China Boeing 767 crashed into a fog-shrouded mountain near the southern city of Busan in South Korea.
Rescuers on Tuesday night included local fishermen who had witnessed the disaster. ”The fishermen helped retrieve several bodies,” the China Northern official said, adding the weather had hampered efforts.
”It’s cold and dark. They can’t see anything. It makes rescue work difficult, but they worked non-stop through the night,” he said.
The flight, carrying 103 passengers and nine crew, took off from Beijing International Airport at 8:37 pm (1237 GMT) and was scheduled to land at Dalian Zhoushuizi International Airport at 9:40 pm (1340 GMT), Xinhua said.
Liu Jiqing, a loader at Dalian port, told Xinhua he ”saw a plane making several circles before suddenly plunging into the sea”. The plane had no lights on, he added. ? AFP
