Chinese Airliner Plunges Into Sea; 112 Feared Dead

A Chinese airliner carrying 112 people crashed into the ocean off China’s northeastern coast late Tuesday, and all aboard were feared dead.

By early this morning, 62 bodies had been recovered from the Bo Hai bay, where the plane, China Northern Airlines Flight 6136, crashed just six miles shy of its destination, the official New China News Agency said. The plane was nearing the port city of Dalian when it plunged into the sea after the pilot reported a fire in the cabin.

Dozens of boats trawled the waters searching for the 50 people still missing, but no one was expected to have survived.

It was the second deadly crash of a Chinese airliner within a month. On April 15, an Air China flight bound for Pusan, South Korea, slammed into a foggy hillside outside the airport there, killing at least 122 people. Six people remain unaccounted for.

Tuesday’s crash deals another setback to China’s aviation industry, which has tried hard to improve its image after a string of accidents in the 1980s and ‘90s.

Experts say safety has improved as China’s domestic airlines upgraded their fleets and strengthened pilot training, but the two recent crashes are likely to spur greater efforts to increase safety in a country where air travel, for business and leisure, is booming.

President Jiang Zemin has ordered a government investigation of Tuesday’s crash, which occurred at the end of a weeklong national holiday to celebrate May Day.

The China Northern flight, with 103 passengers and nine crew members, took off from Beijing at 8:37 p.m. Air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane an hour later, several minutes before it was scheduled to land at Dalian’s Zhoushuizi airport.

A witness on the ground in Dalian told the New China News Agency that he saw the plane, its lights off, circle several times before plummeting into the sea.

Among the debris found in the water was a blackened, broken food cart, “which indicates the seriousness of the fire,” the news agency said.

The passengers were mostly Chinese residents of the Dalian area. At least eight were foreigners, the news agency said.

The plane was an MD-82 airliner, a twin-engine model first manufactured by McDonnell Douglas before the company was absorbed by Boeing. It is capable of carrying up to 172 passengers. Boeing’s Web site says 35 MD-80 series planes were assembled and are operating in China.

In recent years, China has gone on a shopping spree for new aircraft, mostly made by Boeing and Airbus Industrie.

In October, Chinese aviation officials announced a $1.6-billion contract with Boeing for an order of 30 planes.

In addition to updating airline fleets, which include aging Russian- and Chinese-made planes, the government has dedicated $1.2 billion to upgrading air-traffic control systems by 2010.

Spending to improve safety began in earnest in the ‘90s after a spate of deadly accidents. In 1992, 261 people died in three crashes. China’s worst air disaster occurred in 1994, when an airliner exploded minutes after takeoff, killing 160 people.

No fatalities were reported last year.

Officials took pride in the fact that the country’s flagship airline, Air China, boasted an unblemished record. But that was shattered by last month’s crash of Flight 129. Although it was raining at the time, pilot error may have been to blame for the crash.