Passenger Jet crashes in Congo

An airliner plowed into dense forest as it tried to land during a rainstorm in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday, killing 127 people on board, the Congolese transport ministry said.  There were 51 survivors, a ministry statement said. The chief executive of the airline involved in the crash told Reuters earlier that there had been 110 people on board the plane, of whom 53 had died and 57 survived. But a spokesman for the transport ministry, Gudile Bualya, accused the airline of underestimating the number of passengers.

The accident at the international airport of Kisangani, a commercial center and river port town in the east, is the latest in a string of disasters in the vast central African country which has saddled it 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. 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 plowed 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 difficulties in reaching the wreckage, some 200 meters (yards) from the runway in dense equatorial forest. Congo is roughly the same size as Western Europe but rail and road links through its jungles are few, so air and river travel are usually the only viable options for long distance journeys. In April, 32 people were killed when a U.N. 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. They fly purely within Congo. Once the world's best-selling airliner, the Boeing 727 first flew in 1963 and was designed for short- and medium-haul routes. The last aircraft was delivered in 1984.

Iran Air crashes killing 71 of 106 onboard

An IranAir passenger jet carrying 106 people crashed as it was making an emergency landing during a snowstorm on Sunday in the country's northwest and broke into several pieces, killing 71 of those on board, Iranian media reported.The others survived with slight injuries.

The pilots of the Boeing-727, operated by Iran's national airline, attempted the emergency landing in the city of Orumiyeh, 460 miles (700 kilometres) northwest of the capital, Tehran, after reporting a technical failure to the control tower, the semiofficial Mehr news agency reported, quoting a deputy provincial governor, Ebrahim Fatholahi. The nature of the technical failure was unclear. A spokesman for the Iranian civil aviation organisation, Abbas Mosayebi, said only that the plane "faced an incident," state TV reported. The network also said the aircraft disappeared from radar and went down in farmland after making a second attempt to land. The aircraft was heading from Tehran to Orumiyeh, capital of West Azerbaijan province. State TV aired footage showing rescue workers and local farmers searching for survivors on Sunday night in parts of the wrecked plane, under snowfall and in the darkness.
Thirty-five people survived, including two crew members, said Javad Mahmoudi, deputy governor of West Azerbaijan, speaking to State TV. He put the number of confirmed dead at 71. Some of the passengers were only lightly wounded and able to walk off the plane, but some had to be taken to hospital, Mosayebi said. Heavy snow complicated rescue efforts, said the head of the State Emergency Centre, Gholam Reza Masoumi, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. The report also said there was fog in the area. The plane broke into several pieces, but there was no explosion or fire, said Mahmoud Mozaffar, head of the rescue department of  Iran's Red Crescent Society, speaking on state TV.

Iran has a history of frequent air accidents blamed on its ageing aircraft and poor maintenance. IranAir's fleet includes Boeing and Airbus aircraft, many of them bought before the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian airlines, including those run by the state, are chronically strapped for cash, and maintenance has suffered, experts say. U.S. sanctions prevent Iran from updating its 30-year-old American aircraft and make it difficult to get European spare parts or planes as well. The country has come to rely on Russian aircraft, many of them Soviet-era planes that are harder to get parts for since the Soviet Union's fall.