Perilous Times
Jet misses runway, crashes in China; 42 killed
By ALEXA OLESEN
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 25, 2010; 12:57 AM
BEIJING -- Aviation officials at a relatively new airport in northeast
China searched through debris Wednesday for clues to why a passenger
jet crashed and burned while trying to land on a fog-shrouded runway,
killing 42 people and injuring 54 others.
The Henan Airlines plane with 91 passengers and five crew crashed late
Tuesday in a grassy area near the Lindu airport on the outskirts of
Yichun. Five of those onboard were children, the Civil Aviation
Administration of China said, and at least one, an 8-year-old boy,
survived.
It was China's first major commercial air disaster in nearly six years.
The plane's black box was recovered, Xinhua reported, but it is still
not known what caused the accident.
The newly built Yichun airport sits in a forested valley and has
operated for a year, and concerns about the safety of night landings
there had been raised by at least one major airline.
China Southern Airlines decided last August to avoid night flights in
and out of Yichun, switching its daily flight from Harbin to the
daytime. A technical notice cited concerns about the airport's
surrounding terrain, runway lighting and wind and weather conditions.
"Principally there should be no night flights at Yichun airport," said
the notice from China Southern's Heilongjiang province branch that was
posted online. An employee with the branch's technical office confirmed
the notice's authenticity. He declined to give his name because he was
not authorized to talk to the media, but said China Southern decided to
cancel night flights at Yichun "for safety concerns. We're cautious."
The crash and fire were so severe that little of the fuselage remained,
though the charred tail was still largely intact. China Central
Television said eight of the victims were found 65 to 100 feet (20 to
30 meters) from the plane's wreckage in a muddy field.
The official Xinhua News Agency said officials had earlier reported 43
dead because one body was torn apart in the crash and had been counted
as two. It said the pilot, Qi Quanjun, survived the crash but was badly
hurt and cannot speak.
One of the dead was a Chinese with a foreign passport, according to
Xinhua, but it did not give the nationality. It also said a passenger
from Taiwan was hurt.
The Brazilian-made Embraer E-190 jet had taken off from Heilongjiang's
capital of Harbin shortly before 9 p.m. (1300 GMT) and crashed a little
more than an hour later while arriving at Yichun, a city of about 1
million people 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the Russian border.
A middle-age man who survived the crash told China Central Television
there was bad turbulence as the plane descended, then several big jolts
that caused the luggage to come crashing from the overhead bins.
"After we stopped, the people in the back were panicking and rushed to
the front," the unidentified man, who had no visible injuries, said in
an interview from a hospital bed. "We were trying to open the
(emergency exits) but they wouldn't open. Then the smoke came in ...
within two or three minutes or even a minute, we couldn't breathe. I
knew something bad was going to happen."
The man said he and a few others escaped from a hole in the wall of the
cabin near the first row of seats, then ran from the burning wreckage.
Another survivor was Ji Yifan, an 8-year-old boy, who told Xinhua he
was saved by another passnger.
"Someone dragged me to the emergency exit door and threw me out before
I realized what was going on," he was quoted as saying.
Ji told Xinhua that the evacuation slide, which was on fire, broke as
he was sliding down. "I fell to the ground. Again someone dragged me
aside," he said. He was speaking from his hospital bed, where he had
bruises on his face, neck and arms.
Eighteen officials from China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social
Security and various provincial branches were on the flight, headed to
a meeting in Yichun, Xinhua said. It said Vice Minister Sun Baoshu was
in critical condition with broken bones and head injuries.
Wang Xuemei, vice mayor of Yichun, told CCTV that three of the 54
injured were in critical condition but he gave no details. The Yichun
city Communist Party published an online list of victims with 42 names.
They ranged in age from 12, a girl, to 55.
A statement in Chinese on Embraer's website said the company had sent
officials to the crash scene to cooperate with the investigation.
"Embraer extends its profound condolences and wishes for recovery to
the families and friends of those lost or injured in the accident," it
said.
Henan Airlines is based in the central Chinese province of the same
name and flies smaller regional jets, mainly on routes in north and
northeast China. Previously known as Kunpeng Airlines, the carrier was
relaunched as Henan Airlines earlier this year. It launched the
Yichun-Harbin service this year.
Henan Airlines, which on Wednesday suspended all its flights, and many
other regional Chinese airlines flying shorter routes have struggled in
the past few years, losing passengers to high-speed railroad lines that
China has aggressively expanded.
Full-tilt expansion of Chinese air traffic in the 1990s led to a series
of crashes that gave China the reputation of being unsafe. The poor
record prompted the government to improve safety drastically, from
airlines to new air traffic management systems at airports.
The last major passenger jet crash in China was in November 2004, when
an China Eastern airplane plunged into a lake in northern China,
killing all 53 on board and two on the ground.
--
Associated Press researchers Yu Bing, Xi Yue and Zhao Liang contributed
to this story.