Plane crashes in Congo forest, 53 dead
An airliner ploughed into dense forest as it tried to land during a rainstorm in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday, killing 53 of the 110 people on board, the Congolese company operating the flight said.
The accident at the international airport of Kisangani, a commercial centre, is the latest in a string of disasters that has saddled the vast central African country with one of the worst air safety records in the world.
“The pilot tried to land but apparently they didn’t touch the runway,” Stavros Papaioannou, chief executive of Hewa Bora airline, told Reuters by telephone.
Earlier, government spokesman Lambert Mende said he had been told that rescue services had pulled 40 survivors from the wreckage of the Boeing 727.
Hewa Bora is on a European Union list of airlines banned due to security concerns, as are all carriers certified in Congo.
It is the second fatal accident involving the airline in three years, after its DC-9 airliner ploughed into a suburb of the eastern Congolese city of Goma, killing 44, in 2008.
In April of this year, 32 people were killed when a United Nations plane crashed as it tried to land at the airport serving Congo’s capital Kinshasa. The operator of the plane was Georgian flag carrier Airzena Georgian Airways.
According to Hewa Bora’s website, the airline has two Boeing 727s, both configured as passenger planes with 137 economy seats and 12 business class seats. Jean-Paul Bongisa, a local reporter, said rescue was being hampered by the difficult access to the wreckage, some 200 metres from the runway in dense equatorial forest.
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