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 and river port town, 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. "110 on board, 53 killed and 57 survivors," said Papaioannou, revising down a figure of 112 he gave earlier for the total on board, passengers and crew included. 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. Earlier government spokesman Lambert Mende said rescue services had pulled 40 survivors from the Boeing 727. Jean-Paul Bongisa, a local reporter for Congolese state television at the scene of the crash, told Reuters the rescue was being hampered by the difficult access to the wreckage, some 200 metres (yards) from the runway in dense equatorial forest.
Congo is roughly the same size of Western Europe but rail and road links are few, meaning that air and river travel are usually the only viable options for long distance journeys. In April of this year, 32 people were killed when a UN plane crashed as it tried to land at the airport serving Congo's capital Kinshasa.
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