Argentina plane crash

Argentina plane crash kills all 22 people on board

A small plane has crashed in southern Argentina, killing all 22 passengers and crew on board, officials say.

The plane went down in the Patagonian province of Rio Negro, after issuing a distress call, the operating company Sol Airlines said.

Rescuers were sent to the crash site near the town of Los Menucos.

A local hospital director said no one had been found alive and that "everything was destroyed and burned", Argentine media reported.

The plane, a Saab 340 turboprop with capacity for 34 people, was carrying 19 passengers, including a baby, and three crew.

It was on a flight between Neuquen near the Andes to Comodoro Rivadavia.

Wreckage was found some 25km (15 miles) south-west of Los Menucos.

Argentine media reported that the plane, which crashed on Wednesday night local time, may have iced up.

However, a statement from Sol Airlines said there was so far no indication of what had caused the crash.

The company said it received an emergency communication from the plane at just before 2100 local time (2400 GMT ) about halfway into the flight.

Los Menucos Mayor Mabel Yahuar said a man had seen a ball of fire fall from the sky and alerted the authorities.

But it was difficult for emergency services to reach the crash site, given the terrain and that it was night, she said.

"There's no mobile phone signal in the area. It is an uninhabited place and really cold," Ms Yahuar was quoted as saying by Clarin newspaper.

Congo Plane Crash

Congo plane crash kills 32.

Only one person survives after UN plane crashes in Kinshasa while landing in poor weather

Only one person among 33 passengers and crew survived after a UN plane crashed while attempting to land in poor weather in the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Monday.

The accident, in Kinshasa, is one of the worst to involve a UN aircraft. Most of the passengers were UN staff and peacekeepers, although five NGO workers were also on board.

Alain Le Roy, the head of UN peacekeeping operations, said there had been no immediate information about the sole survivor, who is in hospital in the Congolese capital.

The plane, which was travelling from the eastern city of Goma, had missed the runway in N'djili airport in Kinshasa, possibly because of heavy winds, Le Roy said. The Bombardier CRJ-100 jet broke up on impact and caught fire. Television footage showed the aircraft was almost destroyed. A formal investigation into the crash is under way.

While the nationalities of the victims have not been confirmed, the South African government said three of its citizens had died in the accident. The International Rescue Committee, an American aid agency, said its senior reproductive health adviser in Congo, Dr Boubacar Toure, a Guinean, was also among the dead.

The plane was operated and staffed by Airzena Georgian Airways. The company, which has been flying for the UN in Congo for three years, said its four crew members, all Georgians, had died, and expressed shock at the accident.

The UN security council has sent its "deepest condolences" to the families of the victims.

With 19,000 troops, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo is the world's largest, and is reliant on air transport as the road network is inadequate.

Congo has one of the world's worst aviation safety records, mainly because of the fleet of old and often poorly maintained aircraft that serve the civilian population.

Iran air crash

77 including 4 foreigners killed in Iran's air crash

Iranian officials said Monday the air crash near the airport of the northwestern city of Uroumieh on Sunday killed 77, including four foreigners.

Iran's Coroner Organization confirmed in an announcement on Monday earlier reports that 77 of the people on board were killed in the incident, according to a report by local Mehr news agency.

Four Iraqi nationals were among the victims of the Sunday air crash in Iran's West Azerbaijan province, Mehr quoted Coroner Organization's report as saying, adding that two of the four Iraqi nationals have been identified by their relatives.

There were no Chinese passengers on the plane, Chinese embassy officials in Tehran told Xinhua.

Names of 73 people, 51 of whom were men and 22 were women, were disclosed by the announcement which said that four others killed in the accident still need to be identified.

An earlier report by semi-official Fars news agency said that 12 crew members were also among the killed.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed condolences to the families of the victims on Monday.

Some 27 others were injured when the passenger plane crashed near Uroumieh, according to Nosrat Molazadeh, head of Uroumieh University of Medical Sciences, local satellite Press TV reported. The injured people were transferred to the hospitals in Uroumieh.

Although on the basis of the latest reports the number of the people on board amounts to 104, there were, however, different local media reports, ranging from 104 to 106.

On Monday, another passenger plane which took off from Tehran's Mehrabad airport at 17:00 local time (1330 GMT) could not land in Uroumieh airport due to bad whether and flew back to Tehran, Xinhua reporters said.

The Fokker 100 passenger plane, belonging to IranAir airlines flew above the Uroumieh airport with one hour's delay, but failed to land and had to return to Tehran, according to Xinhua reporters who were on board to Uroumieh to report about the Sunday's air crash.

On Sunday, the Boeing-727, also belonging to the state-owned IranAir airliner, took off from Tehran Mehrabad airport at 18:00 local time (1430 GMT) and crashed at 19:45 local time (1615 GMT) near a village some 15 km from Uroumieh.

One of the black boxes of the plane has been found and the cause of the crash was yet to be found out, but earlier reports have linked the incident to bad whether condition and technical problems on the plane.

"Ten minutes before the plane arrived at the Uroumieh airport, the pilot informed the airport control tower that it cannot land due to the bad whether condition... and after that it disappeared from the radar," the governor of West Azerbaijan told Iran state IRINN TV on Sunday night.

However, in another report by Mehr, the political deputy of West Azerbaijan governor said that the last conversation of the pilot with the control tower revealed that, before the emergency landing, he had announced that his plane had a technical problem.

Iran has seen several air disasters, involving both civil and military use aircraft, in recent years.

In July 2009, a Caspian Airlines plane crashed near the northwestern city of Qazvin, killing all 168 people on board.

Experts said the U.S.-imposed sanctions against Iran, which prevented its allies from selling aircraft or aircraft parts to the country, have undermined safety standards within Iran's civil and military aviation fleet and are increasing the likelihood of more air disasters.

Read more:

Missing Nepal plane found

22 people aboard a small plane were killed near east of Katmandu.

All 22 people aboard a small plane were killed when it crashed in Nepal's rugged east, searchers said Thursday, finding the wreckage on a mountainside a day after the plane went missing.

The wreckage was found about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Katmandu, the Rescue Coordination Committee at Katmandu Airport said.

It was not yet clear what caused the crash. The plane had been chartered to carry pilgrims to a Hindu temple and was on its way back to the capital.

Debris from the plane was scattered over a 1,000-foot (300-meter) radius on the side of a mountain, police official Bhesh Bahadur Thapa said in a telephone interview from a station near the crash site.

Thapa said rescuers were collecting the bodies and preparing to send them to Katmandu.

The Canadian-built Twin Otter aircraft operated by domestic Tara Air took off Wednesday from Lamidanda, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) east of Katmandu, and then disappeared.

Airport official Dinesh Shrestha said three rescue aircraft including an army helicopter scoured the area Wednesday evening and early Thursday and located the crash site.

The three crew members and 18 passengers were Nepali nationals, while another passenger was a Tibetan holding a U.S. passport. Other details were not available.

Air India plane crash

Indian passenger plane crash 'Sleepy' pilot blamed.

Plane Crash News Updates! A sleepy pilot who approached the runway at the wrong angle and ignored warning signs was to blame for a passenger plane crash in southern India in May that claimed 158 lives, reports said Wednesday.

A Court of Inquiry probe concluded the Air India pilot Zlatko Glusica, from Serbia, was asleep for much of the three-hour flight and was "disorientated" when the plane started to descend, the Hindustan Times reported.

The low-cost Air India Express plane flying from Dubai to the city of Mangalore overshot the runway, plunged into a gorge and burst into flames. Eight people survived the inferno.

The official crash report, which has not been released publicly, was submitted to the civil aviation ministry on Tuesday.

Voice recordings picked up the co-pilot saying: "We don't have runway left," seconds before the disaster.

Most of the dead were migrant workers returning from the Gulf where many Indians from southern states find low-paid employment as construction workers or domestic staff in cities such as Dubai.

The six-member court was set up to investigate the cause of India's first major air crash since 2000 and its worst aviation disaster since 1996, when two jets collided in mid-air over New Delhi, killing nearly 350 people.

More >>

Florida Plane Crash

3 Dead, 1 Injured in Florida Small Plane Crash

Florida News Updates! Airport officials say three people are dead and another seriously injured in a small plane crash in Florida.

The Federal Aviation Administration reports that the twin-engine Piper PA-44 crashed during takeoff and caught fire Thursday evening.

Neither the Palm Beach International Airport nor the FAA could immediately identify the pilot or the passengers. The survivor was taken by helicopter to an area hospital.

Records show the plane was owned by FIT Aviation LLC, a Melbourne flight school.

Plane Crash in Sudan

Plane Crash in Sudan Kills At Least 2

Sudan News Updates! A Sudanese aviation official says a plane carrying 36 people crashed as it was landing in the western Darfur region killing at 2.

Abdel Hafiz Rahim said the Russian-built Antonov 26 crashed at the Zalingei airstrip Thursday and "90 percent of the 33 passengers and three crew" had survived. Another four were wounded.

The plane from Tarco Airline was on a scheduled flight from Khartoum.

Rahim said the cause of the crash was under investigation but noted that the airstrip was rudimentary and badly paved.

Henan Airlines plane crashed in Lindu - China

Chinese jet misses runway and bursts into flames.

Chinese jet misses runway and bursts into flames; state media say 42 killed and 54 rescued.

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.

Kathmandu - Nepal plane crash

14 feared dead in Nepal air crash near Kathmandu.

A small passenger aircraft, carrying at least 14 people, has crashed in bad weather in Nepal.

The aircraft was travelling in heavy rain on Tuesday about 50km outside Kathmandu, the capital, when it crashed into the hills near Shikharpur village, according to Bahadur Shrestha, a police chief.

The aircraft was flying to Lukla, the entry point to Mount Everest.

There were thought to be at least six foreign tourists onboard, though their nationalities have yet to be identified. There was one crew member on the Angi Air craft.

"There was a telephone call from locals saying that the plane had crashed," Triratna Manandhar, a Kathmandu airport official, said.

"I cannot confirm on the basis of a telephone report. We are sending army helicopter for search and rescue."

Subina Shrestha, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Kathmandu, said: "The rescue operation is on its way but they are having problems because the weather is terrible.

"Witnesses in the area say that the plane is in pieces and bodies are strewn around the area."

Shrestha said that the region is prone to air crashes because of bad weather and that there is about one air crash in the area annually.

Alaska plane crash

Former Senator Ted Stevens dies in Alaska plane crash.

Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, 86, has died in a plane crash in Alaska while en route to a fishing trip.

Former Nasa chief Sean O'Keefe was also aboard the small plane with his teenage son, but both survived.

Officials said five people had been killed and four had survived - with two badly hurt.

The wreckage is located on a mountainside near the town of Dillingham. Rescue and recovery efforts were slowed by bad weather.

President Barack Obama paid tribute to Mr Stevens in a statement.

"A decorated World War II veteran, Senator Ted Stevens devoted his career to serving the people of Alaska and fighting for our men and women in uniform," he said.

"Michelle and I extend our condolences to the entire Stevens family and to the families of those who perished alongside Senator Stevens in this terrible accident."

Also killed was the pilot, Theron "Terry" Smith, 62, and a 16 year-old.

Mr O'Keefe and his teenage son suffered broken bones and other injuries, former NASA spokesman Glenn Mahone said.

The alarm was raised on Monday evening when the plane failed to land on schedule. Shortly afterwards, local residents spotted the wreckage on the side of a mountain about 17 miles north of Dillingham.

Harsh weather conditions hampered the rescue effort until early the next morning, and Alaska National Guard used helicopter hoists to rescue four survivors.

Several local Samaritans had reached the wreckage before rescuers could arrive and tended to the survivors, officials said. The survivors were flown to Anchorage.

A crash investigation team arrived in the afternoon from Washington DC.

For more news