15 Killed in Plane Crash in Northeastern Australia

All 15 people on board a light plane that crashed in Australia’s remote northeast have been confirmed dead, police said today, making it the nation’s worst civil aviation disaster in nearly four decades.

A recovery operation was underway on a rugged hillside in Queensland state where the twin-propeller plane went down.

“We’ve just had a police officer winched in who has confirmed there are no signs of life,” Queensland police spokeswoman Kirsten Roos told Associated Press.

The crash was Australia’s worst civil aviation accident since 1968, when an MMA Viscount crashed near Port Hedland in Western Australia state, killing 26.

The burning wreckage was spotted late Saturday in dense tropical forest by a search aircraft nearly 10 miles northwest of the Lockhart River air strip, Australian Search and Rescue spokeswoman Tracey Jiggins said.

Peter Gibson of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority told Australia’s Nine Network that the plane was flying in rain, low clouds and 23 mph winds when it crashed.

The twin-propeller Fairchild Metroliner, operated by Aero-Tropics airline, was traveling to Lockhart River, an Aboriginal community of 350 people.

The plane carried two pilots and 13 passengers. The pilot radioed that the plane was about to land just before the crash, Police Superintendent Michael Keating told reporters.

Three planes and two helicopters joined the search in the sparsely populated region, state police said.

Australia’s last major air disaster was in 1996, when two army Black Hawk helicopters collided near the Queensland city of Townsville, killing 18 people.

Lockhart River is a former Anglican mission where Aborigines from across Cape York were placed in the 1920s until the outbreak of World War II, when the mission was abandoned.

The mission was re-established as a community for Aborigines in 1947 and the church was forced to hand it over to the Queensland government in 1964.

In recent years, the tiny township has become known as the home of a critically acclaimed group of Aboriginal artists known as the Lockhart River Gang whose works sell for tens of thousands of dollars.