The crowd at the off-road race was almost close enough to touch the trucks as they hurtled and bounced over the desert sand — close enough for one mistake to end eight lives.

Hundreds of thrill-seeking fans watched in horror Saturday night as one racer took a jump at high speed, hit his brakes on landing and rolled his truck sideways into spectators, sending bodies flying on a section of track that had no guardrails or anything else to keep the crowd back.

Eight people were killed and 12 were injured at the California 200, a race in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

“You could touch it if you wanted to. It’s part of the excitement,” said 19-year-old Niky Carmikle, who stood sobbing over a makeshift memorial on the spot of the crash Sunday. Her boyfriend, 24-year-old Zachary Freeman of Fillmore, was killed in the crash. “There’s always that risk factor, but you just don’t expect that it will happen to you.”

CHP officer Joaquin Zubieta said Brett M. Sloppy, 28, of San Marcos, was behind the wheel of truck involved in the crash near the city of Lucerne Valley. Zubieta said alcohol was not a factor in the crash and there were no plans to arrest Sloppy.

Zubieta said state vehicle codes don’t apply because it was a sanctioned racing event held with the approval of the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns the land used for the race.
Tens of thousands of people were spread out along the 50-mile track, but the site of the crash, a stretch known as the “rockpile,” is one of the most popular areas to gather, witnesses said.

Some witnesses said they got within 4 feet of the unmarked track, watching trucks fly through the air over a series of jumps.

The driver “hit the rock and just lost control and tumbled,” said Matt March, 24, of Wildomar, who was standing next to the jump. “Bodies went everywhere.”

March said he and several other fans lifted the truck, which came to rest with its oversized wheels pointing toward the sky, and found four people lying unconscious underneath.

John Payne, 20, of Anaheim, said he was among the first people to reach the truck. He said the victims included one person who was decapitated.
“It was complete chaos,” Payne said.

Carmikle had gone to the bathroom when the crash happened. When she came back, Freeman and his best friend, 24-year-old Dustin Malson of Ventura, were dead.

“Bodies all over the ground, people screaming, and all I wanted to do was find my boyfriend and my friends,” Carmikle said.

It took rescue vehicles and helicopters more than half an hour to reach the remote location, though spectators said off-duty police and firefighters in the crowd joined paramedics hired by the race organizer to help the injured and place blankets over the dead.

Six people died at the scene and two others died after being taken to a hospital, authorities said. Seven ambulances and 10 emergency aircraft responded, airlifting most of the 12 injured people from the area to hospitals.

Paramedics brought six people — five adults and a child — to Loma Linda University Medical Center, spokesman Herbert Atienza said Sunday. He had no information on their condition.

Officials said Sloppy, the driver, wasn’t hurt. It was not clear why he lost control of the truck, a white modified Ford Ranger with “Misery Motorsports” painted on the doors.

A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Sloppy and included a picture of his truck was updated Sunday with a note: “Soo incredibly lost and devistated my thoughts and prayers go out to all the familys and friends involved.. Thank you too all my friends for sticking with me even thru these tragic times I love you all.”

Nearly 40 friends responded with messages of support by Sunday afternoon.

Jeff Talbott, inland division chief for the California Highway Patrol, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise that the driver was forced to run from the scene when the crowd grew unruly and some began throwing rocks at him. Several witnesses, however, said they didn’t see anyone throwing rocks at the driver.

Phone and e-mail messages left for the race organizer, South El Monte-based Mojave Desert Racing, were not immediately returned. The race is part of a series held in the Mojave Desert’s Soggy Dry Lake Bed.

A small cross and a circle of rocks were placed Sunday near the ruts in the ground left by the truck. Bags of victims’ clothing, some of it bloody, sat nearby.

There were no barriers at the site of the crash. Fans said these races rarely have any kind of safety guards.

“That’s desert racing for you,” Payne said. “You’re at your own risk out here. You are in the middle off the desert. People were way too close and they should have known. You can’t really hold anyone at fault. It’s just a horrible, horrible accident.”

The CHP does not normally investigate crashes at organized events, but took the lead on this probe because of its scope. It set up a command center at the starting line of the race. The federal Bureau of Land Management was assisting in the investigation.

Aside from Freeman and Malson, those killed included Brian Wolfin, 27, Anthony Sanchez, 23, and Aaron Farkas, 25, all of Escondido; Danica Frantzich, 20, of Las Vegas; and Andrew Therrin, 22, of Riverside. The name of the eighth victim had not been released Sunday afternoon.

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Officials in Colombia called it a “miracle” that the plane crash on a Colombian island early Monday morning resulted in just one death.

Even as authorities work to determine what caused the Boeing 737 to go down, deft piloting is being pointed to as a key factor in saving the lives of the 130 other people aboard, including at least five American citizens.

“The pilot’s professionalism prevented the plane from going off the runway,” Gen. Orlando Paez of Colombia’s national police told Caracol Radio.

Officials are investigating whether the plane, which belonged to Colombian carrier Aires and was on its way from the capital, Bogotá, had been hit by lightning as it neared San Andres, a Caribbean resort island off the east coast of Nicaragua. A downdraft could have also caused the crash, officials speculated.

Colombian national police, in a statement, said the plane broke into three parts as it landed. There were at least 121 passengers aboard, including four children, plus six crew members.

The state government sent an e-mail to the Associated Press that said passengers included eight US citizens and four Brazilians. An airline representative later told the Associated Press that only five US citizens were aboard.

The sole death could have been caused by a heart attack, a doctor treating the patients has said.

The damage could have been far worse, according to Robert Sanchez, director of the hospital Amor de Patria, which was treating many of the injured. “It’s incredible. For the dimension [of the accident], there should be more,” he told the Associated Press.

Colombian Air Force Col. David Barrero told the wire service by telephone that “the skill of the pilot kept the plane from colliding with the airport.”

The incident called to mind the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River in 2009, dubbed the “Miracle on the Hudson.” Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was credited then with saving the lives of all 150 passengers when the plane made an emergency landing on the river.

There are many more examples, says Robert Mann, president of R.W. Mann & Company, an aviation consultancy in Port Washington, N.Y. He says skilled pilots have managed to safely land despite structural failures on takeoff, malfunctioning controls, and cargo door failure. (Another example he cites is the 1989 crash in Honolulu that killed nine people, of 355 aboard.)

“Obviously skill goes into it, experience goes into it,” he says.

The experience of past crashes teaches pilots and the industry overall ways to deal with problems in the future. PBS has looked back at the lessons learned from some of the worst air accidents in history.

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An environmental disaster is threatening the Maharashtra coast after Saturday’s ship collision off the Mumbai harbour. Oil and natural-gas rigs operating in the U.S. rose for a ninth consecutive week, as drilling in Texas jumped, according to data published by Baker Hughes Inc. Crude oil rose for the first time in four days amid optimism fuel demand will increase because of improved prospects for an economic recovery in the U.S., the world’s biggest energy user.

New Delhi, India – It was on August 7, when two Panamanian cargo ships collided off the Mumbai coast causing an oil spill from one of the two vessels that is threatening the Mumbai coast.

Indian Coast Guard officials said no casualties were reported to the 33 crew members who were rescued after the incident.

According to Coast Guard officials, the outbound merchant vessel from Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), collided with MV Khalijia-III, five nautical miles from the shores at 9:50 am when the latter was sailing towards Mumbai Port Trust (MPT), off Mumbai harbour, for berthing.

A senior Coast Guard official said on condition of that the spill was “significant” but claimed the situation was “under control”. However, shipping lanes off India’s commercial hub Mumbai may be closed for another two days because of the oil spill.

The collision left the Panamanian vessel tilting in the water, although it has now been stabilized with no more oil leaking from containers on its deck, according to S.S. Dasila, an Indian coast guard commandant.

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More than a day after a freight train derailed and exploded on the Italian coast, officials raised the death toll to 17, including two small children and an unidentified man who subsequently died of severe burns, news agencies reported.

The 14-car train carrying liquefied petroleum gas derailed in Viareggio around midnight on Monday, engulfing a neighborhood in flames. More than 34 people injured, 12 of them in serious condition.

The train was traveling south through coastal Tuscany when the axle on the first car broke, officials said. The train ran off the tracks and exploded.

“We saw a ball of fire rising up to the sky,” one witness, Gianfranco Bini, told The Associated Press. Mr. Bini lives in a building overlooking the station. “We heard three big rumbles, like bombs. It looked like war had broken out.”

The flames ravaged entire streets, and five buildings collapsed, killing some residents as they slept.

“It was an apocalypse,” a survivor said on Italian television, according to Reuters. “All we could smell was gas and things burning, and all we could see was flames.”

Three children were pulled alive from the rubble, the Italian news media reported.

More than 1,000 people were evacuated, and about 100 were left homeless, the mayor of Viareggio, Luca Lunardini, told news agencies.

Accusations of poor infrastructure and questions about why dangerous materials were being shipped through residential areas immediately added to the political pressures on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He was met with boos and cries of “go home” when he arrived in Viareggio on Tuesday afternoon.

At a news conference, Mr. Berlusconi said that the government would soon call a state of emergency, and that it would also “guarantee the reconstruction of 100 percent of the houses destroyed,” Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.

The accident comes a week before the country is expected to host world leaders for the Group of 8 summit meeting, to be held in another disaster zone, L’Aquila. An earthquake there on April 6 killed nearly 300 people and left 65,000 homeless.

Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s senior civil protection official, called the episode one of the “worst tragedies” to occur in the Italian train system, ANSA reported. In 2005, 17 people died in a collision between a passenger and freight train.

Raffaele Gargiulo, a police spokesman for the nearby city of Lucca, told The A.P. that the bodies of the dead were so badly burned that identifications would be difficult.

The regional spokesman for a railway union told ANSA that Tuesday’s accident was the fifth train-related accident in Tuscany this month. Several other trains either derailed or went off their tracks, though there were no reported fatalities or injuries.

Railway unions called for a one-hour halt in train traffic for Wednesday, Reuters reported, out of respect for the dead and to draw attention to the need for higher safety standards.

Death Toll Rises to 17 in Italy Train Derailment

Baya Bakari told her father at a hospital in Yemen that she heard voices around her in the Indian Ocean, but could not see anyone.

She was found clinging to debris some two hours after the crash.

The plane, going to the Comoros Islands from Yemen’s capital Sanaa, came down in bad weather with 153 on board.

Many of the passengers were travelling to the Comoros Islands but had begun their journey in Paris or Marseille on another jet operated by Yemenia, the national airline of Yemen, before boarding flight IY626 in Sanaa.

The EU and France have both said they highlighted safety concerns over Yemenia planes and said the jet that crashed had not flown into EU airspace since 2007.

But no official cause for the crash has yet been found. Earlier on Wednesday a French government minister in the Comoros capital, Moroni, said that a detected signal thought to be from one of the plane’s “black box” flight recorders was in fact a distress beacon.

‘True miracle’

Ms Bakari, who lives in Paris with her family, was treated in hospital in Moroni for injuries, said to include a fractured collarbone and burns.

On Wednesday evening, she was reported to be flying back to Paris in a French government aircraft.

French officials earlier said that she was 12 years old, contradicting earlier reports she was 14.

Speaking from Paris, her father Kassim Bakari said she was thrown from the plane as it hit the water. He said she clearly recalled the chaos of her time in the water.

“She said: ‘Papa, we saw the plane going down in the water. I was in the dark, I couldn’t see a thing.

“‘[And] on top of that daddy, I can’t swim well and I held on to something, but don’t really know what’.

“She’s a very timid girl, I never thought she would escape like that,” he said, adding that she was “fragile” and barely able to swim.

Mr Bakari recalled how he said goodbye to his wife and daughter at the airport as they headed to the Comoros.

“I kissed them both, then my wife turned around, she looked at me and she waved, and my daughter she didn’t do anything, and that was the last time I saw my wife alive, because my daughter… I will see her again I hope, but for my wife it was the last time.”

French officials in Moroni praised the girl’s courage. International Co-operation Minister Alain Joyandet described her rescue as a “true miracle”.

“She is a courageous young girl. She really showed an absolutely incredible physical and moral strength.”

An uncle, Ali Abdou, who visited the girl in hospital in Moroni, told the BBC she did not yet know that her mother had died.

She was scheduled to be transferred back to Paris for treatment later on Wednesday, he added.

“She is conscious, speaking well, [she] is ok. She was joking, she was chatting, we laughed together.

“It’s a miracle. It was God’s will.”

‘No black box’

Earlier, a French government minister reversed earlier claims that one of the plane’s black box recorders had been found.

Mr Joyandet, the French minister in Moroni, said signals picked up by rescuers came from a distress beacon. Most aircraft have a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder.

“The Transall (military plane) that picked up an acoustic signal did not, despite what was said this morning, detect the beacons of the flight recorders, but rather what appear to be its distress beacons,” Mr Joyandet said in Moroni, the Comoros capital, AFP news agency reported.

There were 66 French nationals among the passengers. Most of the rest were Comorans, and most had flown on a different Yemenia aircraft from Paris or Marseille before boarding flight IY626 in Sanaa.

A French vessel has been sent to the site to start recovery operations, she added, and French rescue teams are involved in the search for survivors.

However, no-one from the plane has been confirmed alive apart from Baya Bakari, and rescuers say chances of finding more survivors are slim.

Angry protest

The French transport ministry said on Tuesday that the Airbus 310 plane which crashed had been banned from France because of “irregularities”.

But Yemenia responded by criticising “false information and speculation about technical problems” on the plane.

Several Comoran expatriates angry with what they see as the poor state of the company’s aircraft tried to stop passengers from checking in for another Yemenia flight leaving Paris Charles de Gaulle airport for Sanaa.

About 60 people failed to check in, reports said, but it was not clear how many did so as a result of the protest.

The crash was the second involving an Airbus aircraft in recent weeks. On 1 June an Air France Airbus 330 travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board.

Survivor speaks of Yemenia crash

But even as they analyzed the error messages and satellite images of the doomed flight’s path, investigators said they still have a lot of work to determine what caused the plane to go down.

“I would just like to ask you to bear in mind that all of this is dynamic and there are a lot of question marks,” Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of France’s accident investigation bureau told reporters.

“We don’t know how the aircraft entered the water. We don’t know how these pieces of debris entered into the water and that you have to take into account the current … and the shape of the ocean floor.”

The error messages suggest that the plane may have been flying too fast or too slow through the stormy weather it encountered before the crash, officials said.

In addition, investigators have said the plane’s autopilot disengaged, cabin pressure was lost and there was an electrical failure before the disaster.

The jet’s manufacturer, Airbus, sent a Telex to operators of Airbus models reminding them of what to do when speed indicators give conflicting readings.

The spokesman said the notice does not mean there is any major flaw in the aircraft, but is simply a reminder to pilots of what to do in the cockpit if they get conflicting information about air speed.

All 228 passengers and crew aboard the Airbus 330 are presumed to have died when the plane disappeared northeast of the Fernando de Noronha Islands, an archipelago 355 kilometers (220 miles) off the northeast coast of Brazil.

The flight originated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and was en route to Paris, France.

Search teams were still trying to find debris from the jet Saturday, two days after a Brazilian Air Force official said debris plucked from the ocean was not from the Air France jet.

Official: Missing plane sent 24 error messages

Officials said they had “no hope” for Air France Flight 447 which dropped off the radar three hours and less than 200 miles into a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

As the Brazilian air force mounted a search and rescue operation for the Airbus 330-200k in the waters around the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, families of passengers gathered at a crisis centre in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport awaiting news.

The Foreign Office said it was “urgently” seeking news on whether there were any Britons on board.

Air France said that the aircraft had sent a message reporting an electrical “short circuit” after strong turbulence.

The company said the plane had probably been struck by lightning.

An Airbus source described the failure as “catastrophic” suggesting a sudden and unexplained systems failure.

The flight left Rio at 7pm local time (11pm British time) and was due in Paris at 11.15am (10.15am BST).

It was 190 miles north east of the coastal Brazilian city of Natal when it was lost contact three hours and 20 minutes later.

Authorities began the operation around Fernando de Noronha, an idyllic holiday destination but they cautioned that the search area could be three times the size of Europe.

Air France said that it “shares the emotion and worry of the families concerned.”

A source at the airline told Le Monde: “The plane disappeared from the screens several hours ago.

“It could be a transponder problem, but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected.”

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s office said he had been informed of the crisis and ordered all relevant government agencies to hunt “for any sign of the plane”.

The country’s transport minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, said there was “real pessimism at this hour”.

“We can fear the worst,” he said.

Media in Italy reported that five Italian nationals were among the 216 passengers and 12 crew on board.

Brazil’s air traffic control system has been in crisis since 2006, when a Gol passenger jet collided with a private plane above the Amazon killing all 154 people on board.

That disaster was followed just 10 months later by the worst crash in Brazil’s history when a TAM jet slid off the runway at São Paulo’s city airport and crashed into a warehouse. Some 199 people died.

Although the two crashes were not directly related, Brazil’s air traffic control system and oversight of it were implicated in both. The Gol crash caused nationwide turmoil after air traffic controllers launched strikes and go slows at what they said were poor working conditions.

The system is run by the military but questions were raised about the capacity, training and above all, the English language abilities, of the controllers.

The Gol crash reflected “systematic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air traffic control concepts,” the US’s National Transportation Safety Board said in its final report on the disaster.

Air France plane lost: officials say ‘no hope’ of finding airliner

The military transport plane crashed into homes near an air force base Wednesday morning as it was coming in for a landing.

Over one hundred military personnel and their families were on board the Hercules C-130 plane when it went down in an area of East Java.

Witnesses reported seeing parts of the plane falling from the sky and hearing explosions.

Indonesian television showed burning wreckage scattered across rice paddies.  The tail was the only section of the plane left intact.

First Marshal Bambang Sulistyo is a spokesman for the air force.  He says there is an investigation under way to determine what caused the crash.

He gives the death toll and says it may rise, but so far there are 15 survivors.

Indonesian authorities said the plane, which had been scheduled to fly on to Indonesia’s Papua province, was almost 30 years old.

Indonesia’s air force has suffered a series of deadly crashes.

In April, 24 military personnel died when their Fokker aircraft crashed into a hangar at an air base in West Java.

Indonesia’s commercial aircrafts have also in recent years suffered deadly crashes.

The poor safety record led the European Union to ban Indonesian airlines from its airspace.

Indonesian Military Plane Crash Kills At Least 97

Witnesses saw the plane nosedive in the town of Gardnerville at about 4:10 p.m. (7:10 p.m. ET), but there was no fire, said Sgt. Jim Halsey of the Douglas County sheriff’s office.

Three of the passengers killed were identified as Paul Dallas, 43; Leia Denner, 40; and Brent Fahey, 30; all of Nevada. The fourth passenger and the pilot would not be named until their families were told, the sheriff’s office said.

Authorities believe all five occupants died of blunt force trauma.

The six-seat plane had taken off from Minden-Tahoe Airport — about 5 miles south of Gardnerville, Halsey said.

Witnesses said they did not hear any mechanical distress noises from the plane, nor did they see any parts separate from the plane before the crash, according to the sheriff’s office.

Officials said the plane appeared to fly normally until it crashed about 10 minutes after takeoff.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident. Teams will inspect the crash site Sunday

5 killed in Nevada plane crash