All 89 passengers and crew aboard a Biman Airlines aircraft escaped death when their plane crash-landed in a marshy field in north-eastern Bangladesh, officials said yesterday.
Seventeen people were hospitalised after the Fokker 28, on a domestic flight from Dhaka, crashlanded five miles from Sylhet airport on Monday evening, the Civil Aviation Minister, Mr Alamgir Khan Mohiuddin, said.
Mr Alamgir said nobody was killed, "apparently due to [the] ready wit of the pilot and crew members".
The Sylhet airport manager, Mr Fazlul Karim, quoted the pilot, Mr M.A. Mannan, as saying the aircraft had hit an air pocket at low altitude while preparing to land. Mr Mannan is being treated in hospital for minor head injuries.
The aircraft skidded 500 yards before it came to a halt, with its undercarriage and one wing destroyed, a Biman engineer said. The plane was damaged beyond repair, he added.
Meanwhile, rescue workers looking for the wreckage of a Singaporean airliner which plunged into an Indonesian river last week located the general area of the aircraft's black box recorders yesterday, officials said.
But despite intensive searches of the bed of the Musi river by divers and naval minesweepers for the fuselage of the plane and bodies of victims, little else was found.
Mr Oetarjo Giran, head of the Indonesian team investigating Friday's crash of the SilkAir Boeing 737-300 over southern Sumatra, told reporters the area where the black boxes were believed to be was located during an aerial sweep of the crash site.