USAir Jet Down at LAX : 737 Collides With Commuter Plane; 4 Die : Crash: At least 68 survive inferno, and 29 are missing. Airliner was coming in for a landing and hit a SkyWest plane that was taking off, officials said.

An arriving USAir jetliner crashed into a departing Skywest commuter plane on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport Friday night. At least four people died and 29 were unaccounted for, officials said. At least 24 were injured. There were 101 people involved, including both planes; at least 68 survived.

The USAir Boeing 737--carrying 83 passengers and a crew of six--skidded off the runway after the collision, slammed into a building beside a taxiway and burst into flames, according to witnesses.

The mangled wreckage of the smaller, twin-engine Fairchild Metroliner III with two pilots and eight passengers aboard apparently ended up beneath the burning fuselage of the USAir’s Flight 1493.

As passengers swarmed from the jetliner, at least a dozen fire engines sped to the crash site on the north side of LAX’s passenger terminals. Ambulances sped the injured from the crash to nearby hospitals. Ten were said to have suffered moderate to severe injuries.

One witness said the jetliner’s landing gear was not properly deployed, but USAir contradicted that report, saying there was no intial information that anything was amiss.

Federal Aviation Administration officials said the pilot of the jetliner did not report any unusual circumstances before the landing. Surviving passengers of the Boeing 737 said the collision occurred without warning after an apparently normal touchdown.

The crash happened at nightfall, shortly after 6 p.m. Officials said visibility and weather conditions were good at the time.

Orange flames boiled up from the fuselage and a huge column of smoke towered over the airport. Spotlights and the lights from police, fire and other rescue vehicles silhouetted the smoldering wreckage against the darkened sky.

“It was a sight beyond belief,” said Brett Lyles, 23, of San Francisco, who arrived on another USAir flight that taxied within 300 yards of the wreckage. “People on the flight were dumbfounded.”

USAir officials said Flight 1493 had originated in Syracuse, N.Y.

After stops in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, the flight continued to Los Angeles, reaching LAX slightly ahead of its scheduled 6:11 p.m. arrival.

SkyWest Airlines said its Flight 5569 was preparing to take off for Palmdale when the accident occurred.

Dispatcher Roger Boatright told KNX Radio that he saw the crash from his office at the Avis Rent-a-Car on Airport Boulevard, about 600 yards from the crash site.

“The plane came in without its landing gear,” Boatright said. “I saw it fly over the building. Me and my boss talked about it not having its landing gear down.

“There was like a bright flash and we saw smoke,” he said. “It was like a joke between me and my boss--not putting its landing gear down. Most planes have their landing gear down when they get to this point.

“I didn’t see it touch the ground. I saw a bright flash and that was it.”

On the other hand, Dr. Chul Hong, 62, a physician from Canton, Ohio, who was seated in the seventh row of the USAir flight, said the plane apparently made a smooth, normal landing. Then, about 10 to 30 seconds later, he heard an explosion.

There were “a few bumps, then all of a sudden I hear a big noise,” he said. “I thought the tire was exploding. . . .”

“The row ahead of us just disappeared,” said Laurel Bravo, a passenger from Cleveland, Ohio, who was seated in the fourth row. “The seats all went flying downward. . . . I thought at first it was a rough landing. But then I really thought I was going to die.”

Hong said a large crowd gathered in the front of the passenger cabin during the rush to get out of the burning plane. He said he looked back, spotted an emergency door three seats behind him, ran out the door and didn’t stop until he was about 100 yards away.

“I got a rebirth,” he said. “God save me.”

The 737 ended up against a wall of the former fire station.

The nose of the jetliner appeared to be severely damaged, apparently from the collision. There was a large hole in the top of the fuselage, and the tail section of the plane appeared to be partially torn away.

There was no confirmed report on the fate of the other plane or its passengers. Witnesses said they believed the wreckage of the commuter plane was buried under the fuselage of the larger jet.

A witness identified as Lynn Glenn told KCBS television that there appeared to have been “a huge explosion” at the time of the crash. Glenn said he could not be sure if the explosion occurred just before the plane landed or at the moment it struck ground.

“It looked like there was an explosion,” Glenn said. “It could have been just as it hit the ground, could have been before. . . . It was just a loud explosion. A loud explosion.”

A television reporter aboard a helicopter said he at first saw flames emerging from the rear of the airplane, while the front remained largely intact.

Bob Zullinger said he was playing golf with friends on the nearby Westchester course when “we heard an initial bang, spun around and there was a ball (of) fire. Then this pretty much caromed down the runway, came to a stop. And then there was another bang.”

Witnesses saw dozens of passengers leave the airliner safely. Firefighters simultaneously worked to extinguish flames at the rear of the airliner while aiding survivors.

LAX has four parallel runways, two on the north side of the passenger terminals and two on the south side. The crash occurred on Runway 24 Left, which is on the north side, closest to the passenger terminals.

In the aftermath of the crash, the FAA closed both north runways, and all traffic was shifted to the two south runways.

The last serious accident involving a USAir jetliner occurred in September, 1989, when a Boeing 737 crashed on takeoff at New York’s La Guardia Airport. Two of the 57 passengers aboard were killed when the pilot’s attempt to abort the takeoff failed and the jet skidded off the end of the runway into the East River.

USAir ranked 11th among the 49 major airlines in safety, with four accidents between 1969 and 1988, according to a Conde Nast Traveler survey published last year. The airline had a total of four crashes out of 6.4 million flights in that time.

An FBI spokesman said there was no evidence of terrorism in the crash.

“There’s no indication of any foul play,” said agent Fred Reagan of the Los Angeles FBI office. “No threats were involved. We believe this was accidental.”

Hong, the passenger in the seventh row, said that “the plane started jiggling, then I could see the flames. . . . Everybody started scraeaming.”

People ran toward the front of the plane to get off, Hong said. At first, there was not much smoke, but soon billowing smoke started filling the plane.

A large crowd had gathered toward the front. When Hong saw he couldn’t get out that way, he looked back and spotted an emergency door three seats behind him.

Hong ran out the door and didn’t stop till he was about 100 yards from the plane.

“I got a rebirth,” he said. “God save me.”

Then he called his wife to tell her he was all right. “She was mourning already.”

Diane Birnbaumer, a physician in the emergency room at Harbor UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, said a survivor from the rear of the plane described the landing as routine--at first.

“All he knew was that he felt a big bump, he felt a thud,” she said. The survivor, a white male in his late 20s, was taken to the hospital in a helicopter and was suffering from smoke inhalation.

” . . . He’s too shook up to know how he got out of the plane.”

Michael Holmes, an engineer from Silicon Valley, missed the USAir flight after business in Southern California took longer than he expected. So he caught a later flight back to San Francisco.

“I just called my wife,” he said after stepping off the plane. “She was in tears. She thought I was on that flight.”

Back in Los Angeles, Gretchen Imig, 25, from Lakewood, was visiting friends in an apartment building near the airport. She was watching television when suddenly she saw a big burst of light. Running to a window, she saw the plane sliding rapidly down the runway.

“There were flames coming out of the cockpit and flames coming out of the tail,” she said. “Half the runway was streaked with flames that kept burning.”

Imig then watched six or more people scoot down an emergency chute from the plane.

Witness Glen Bergstrom told the Associated Press that he viewed the scene from his balcony with a telescope.

“I saw three passengers, what I thought were passengers . . . one guy jumped from the plane to the pavement . . . two other people slid down the ramp,” he said.

Later, “there was so much smoke coming out of there I couldn’t see anything, the whole plane must have been on fire,” he said.

At Palmdale Regional Airport, 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles, a group waited quietly for information about the Skywest flight.

Initially, the black, wooden flight board said only that Flight 5569 had been delayed. It wasn’t until shortly after 9 p.m. that SkyWest officials confirmed that the flight that had crashed.

A moment later, a young, blond-haired woman began to cry softly.