Henan Airlines Plane Crash In China Kills 43 [PHOTO]

The Henan Airlines flight took off from Heilongjiang’s capital of Harbin a little before 9 pm and crashed in Yichun just over an hour later.
A Henan Airlines jet with 91 passengers and 5 crew personnel aboard broke apart then burst into flames when it crashed in a grassy area near the Lindu airport on the outskirts of Yichun in China.

State officials said 43 people died and 53 were injured in the crash in the country’s northeast. The runway was blanketed in fog when the plane tried to land.

The Henan Airlines flight took off from Heilongjiang’s capital of Harbin a little before 9 pm and crashed in Yichun just over an hour later.

A Yichun publicity official said some passengers were thrown from the cabin before the aircraft, a Brazilian made Embraer E-190, crashed to the ground.

There are about 1 million people living in Yichun, located in Heilongjiang province, about 160 kilometers from the Russian border.

An unidentified middle aged man who survived the crash described the scene as the plane tried to land. He said there was a lot of turbulence and several big jolts that caused baggage to be thrown out of compartments.

He said after the plane stopped moving, people panicked and ran to the front, trying to open the emergency exits, but they would not open. The man continued “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.”

China Central Television showed firefighters dousing the fire on the plane with hoses then later digging through the jet’s wreckage.

Forty-three bodies were found within a few hours of the crash, and 53 injured, most with broken bones, were sent to the hospital. Five of the passengers aboard the plane were children but it is not yet known if they survived.

[Source: citynewspost.com]