Safety concerns raised about China crash runway

A night-time flight into a remote Chinese city ended with a violent, shaking descent and then a crash near an airport that one major Chinese airline had previously judged unsafe for night landings. More than half the 96 people onboard survived, clambering over luggage as smoke filled the broken fuselage.

The crash in northeast China's Heilongjiang province killed 42 people and was the country's worst commercial air disaster in nearly six years. Among the dead were a husband-and-wife team of flight attendants, a 12-year-old girl, and midlevel economic development officials on their way to a conference in Yichun, a small city tucked amid boreal forests 150km from the Russian border.

Investigators recovered two black boxes from the wreckage of the Henan Airlines Embraer 190 jet and were waiting to question the pilot, Qi Quanjun, who survived but was badly injured, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Shortly before the crash, Qi told air traffic controllers he saw the runway lights and was preparing to land, Xinhua quoted an Yichun city official as saying.

But fog shrouded the airport tucked into a valley, with visibility less than 600m. Survivors described seeing nothing but blackness outside the windows as the plane slammed into grass and fell apart about 1.5km from the runway at Yichun city's Lindu Airport.

The accident underscores the breakneck expansion of China's aviation industry in recent years and the struggles of regulators to keep up. Airports have proliferated, as have small regional airlines, reaching into remote cities like Yichun, eager to develop tourism and other businesses to catch up with the country's economic boom.

China Southern Airlines, one of the country's three-largest carriers, decided last August to avoid night flights in and out of the newly built Lindu Airport, setting its daily flight from Harbin to the daytime. A technical notice cited concerns about the airport's surrounding terrain, runway lighting and wind and weather conditions.

"Principally, there should be no night flights at Yichun airport," said the notice from China Southern's Heilongjiang branch that was posted online. An employee with the branch's technical office verified the notice's authenticity.

He declined to give his name because he was not authorised to talk to the media, but said China Southern decided to cancel night flights at Sichuan "for safety concerns. We're cautious."

Henan Airlines, a small regional carrier, previously reported alleged problems with their Embraer 190 jets, including finding turbine cracks and erroneous information showing up in their flight control systems.

The official magazine of the Civil Aviation Administration of China reported in its official magazine last June that the airline, then called Kunpeng Airlines, discussed the problems with technicians from Brazil's Embraer, US engine-maker General Electric Corp. and officials from CAAC at a meeting. The report said CAAC officials urged the parties to find and fix the problems, but it was not clear if the issues were resolved.

Tracy Chen, a spokeswoman for Embraer in Beijing, said she could not confirm the report but noted the company was co-operating with authorities in the investigation.

Najmedin Meshkati, an aviation expert and engineering professor at the University of Southern California, said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the crash, though he was concerned that the airline had reported mechanical problems with their planes. Meshkati said he hadn't heard any reports of similar problems among other airlines using the aircraft.