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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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Continue reading »]]> A 12-year-old girl thought to be the only survivor of the Yemenia air crash has told how she was thrown into the ocean and watched her aircraft sink.

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

Continue reading »]]> Air France Flight 447 sent out 24 automated error messages — including one saying the aircraft’s autopilot had disengaged — before it vanished with 228 people on board, aviation investigators said Saturday.

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

Continue reading »]]> More than 200 people are believed dead after an Air France passenger jet disappeared over the Atlantic on a flight from Brazil.

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

Continue reading »]]> An Indonesian military plane has crashed, killing at least 97 people.  As Daniel Schearf reports from

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

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Continue reading »]]> A twin-engine plane crashed in western Nevada Saturday afternoon, killing all five people on board, authorities said.

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

Continue reading »]]> A U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter, designed to be the world’s top air-superiority aircraft, crashed Wednesday near Edwards Air Force Base, California, while on a test mission, an Air Force official said.

The Lockheed Martin Corp -built F-22 went down about 10 a.m. Central Time about 35 miles northeast of Edwards, where it had been based, said Maj. Michelle Coghill, a spokeswoman for the Air Combat Command.

“It was a test mission,” she said, citing preliminary information. She said the condition of the lone pilot was not immediately known. An investigation would take place, Coghill said.

Lockheed F-22 fighter crashes in California

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A FedEx cargo plane has crashed on landing at Tokyo’s international airport and burst into a ball of flames. A pilot and co-pilot were aboard but their safety could not immediately be confirmed.

The plane was on a regular flight from Guangzhou, China. It landed under heavy winds early Monday, appeared to bounce and burst into flames as it skidded to a halt. Firetrucks were trying to put out the flames more than 30 minutes after the crash.

Continue reading »]]> A FedEx cargo plane burst into flames after bouncing off a runway in unusually high winds at Tokyo’s main international airport Monday, killing the pilot and copilot and closing a major runway for several hours.

The flight from Guangzhou, China, skipped along the main runway at Narita Airport before skidding to a fiery halt, according to footage from airport security cameras. Firefighters and rescuers immediately swarmed the plane.

The pilot and copilot — the only people onboard the flight — were pulled from the cockpit and taken to a local hospital, where they were later confirmed dead.

National broadcaster NHK identified them as 54-year-old pilot Kevin Kylemosley and his 49-year-old copilot, Anthony Stephen-Pino.

FedEx could not immediately confirm details of the crash, spokeswoman Denise Lauer said in an e-mail from the company’s Memphis office. Police could confirm only that the two crew member has died.

The plane smashed into the longer of Narita’s two runways, which remained closed Monday morning with all incoming flights diverted, said airport spokeswoman Misuho Fukuda.

Ikuo Uda, a spokesman for Narita International Airport Corp., which manages the airport, said 16 international flights were canceled, and that the airport was operating with only one runway several hours after the crash.

Unusually strong winds of up to about 47 miles per hour (76 kilometers per hour) were blowing through Narita City on Monday morning around the time of the crash, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. Airport officials said it was too early to say whether the strong winds caused the crash.

Local news reports said the plane was an MD-11, a widebody airliner built by McDonnell Douglas and based on the DC-10.

Strong winds and turbulence have caused other recent incidents at the airport. Last month a flight from the Philippines was jolted by severe turbulence as it circled prior to landing, injuring 50 passengers and crew members.

Narita Airport is a major international hub located about 35 miles (60 kilometers) east of central Tokyo. It is Japan’s second-busiest airport, after Haneda Airport, a largely domestic hub in Tokyo.

Cargo plane crashes on landing at Tokyo airport

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Continue reading »]]> BUTTE, Mont. — A small plane — possibly carrying children on a ski trip — crashed Sunday as it approached the Butte airport, killing 14 to 17 people aboard, a federal official said. The single engine turboprop nose-dived into a cemetery 500 feet from its destination.

The aircraft crashed and burned while attempting to land, said Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus. The plane crashed in Holy Cross Cemetery.

An investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board offered few details at a press conference in Butte Sunday night. No cause of the crash was given.

“We are just beginning our investigation,” said Kristi Dunks. “We don’t have a lot of information at this time.

“Certain family members were contacted,” she said. “At this point, I don’t have an exact number.”

The aircraft had departed from Oroville, Calif., and the pilot had filed a flight plan showing a destination of Bozeman, about 85 miles southeast of Butte. But the pilot canceled his flight plan at some point and headed for Butte, Fergus said.

Preliminary reports indicate the dead include numerous children, he said. There were no known fatalities on the ground, he added.

“We think that it was probably a ski trip for the kids,” Fergus said.

Martha and Steve Guidoni, who were at a gas station across from the cemetery, told the Standard that the plane “just nose-dived into the ground.”

“My husband went over there to see if he could do anything,” Martha Guidoni said.

Fergus said the Pilatus PC-12 aircraft was manufactured in 2001. Such planes are certified to carry 12 people.

The plane was registered to Eagle Cap Leasing Inc. in Enterprise, Ore., Fergus said. He didn’t know who was operating the plane.

I. Felkamp is listed in Oregon corporate records as Eagle Cap’s president. Attempts to reach him by phone were unsuccessful.

The flight originated at Brown Field Municipal airport in San Diego on Saturday evening and flew to Redlands, Calif., where it left Sunday morning for Vacaville, Calif., according to Flight Aware, a Web site that tracks air traffic. From there it flew to Oroville, Calif., and then to Butte. The NTSB could not confirm that information.

“We are still gathering the information of the aircraft, it’s purpose, what they were doing and where they were going,” Dunks said.

In California, Tom Hagler said he saw a group of about a dozen children and four adults Sunday morning at the Oroville Municipal Airport, about 70 miles north of Sacramento.

Hagler, owner of Table Mountain Aviation, described the children as ranging from about 6- to 10 year olds. He let the children into his building to use the restroom.

“There were a lot of kids in the group,” he said. “A lot of really cute kids.”

Hagler said he showed the pilot where he could fuel his plane, and the pilot said he expected his flight to take two-and-a-half hours. The pilot didn’t file a flight plan at the Oroville airport.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said its investigators were expected to arrive in Butte late Sunday or early Monday.

The crash is the fourth major plane accident in the U.S. in slightly more than three months.

On Dec. 20, Continental Airlines plane veered off a runway and slid into a snowy field at Denver International Airport, injuring 37 people. No one was killed. In January, a US Airways jetliner landed in New York’s Hudson River after a flock of geese disabled both its engines. All 155 people onboard survived. Last month, commuter plane fell on a house in a suburb of Buffalo, N.Y., killing all 49 passengers and a man in the home.

Before the Buffalo crash there hadn’t been an accident involving a commercial airliner in the U.S. in which there were fatalities in more than two years.

The Associated Press: