Indian air crash kills at least 60

An Indian commercial airliner burst into flames yesterday seconds before a second landing attempt in eastern India's Bihar state and crashed into a housing estate, killing all but seven of the 58 people on board and at least 10 others on the ground.

Police in Bihar's capital, Patna, the scene of the accident, said five of the seven passengers and at least four others rescued from the housing colony had been hospitalised in a critical condition.

Eyewitnesses said one of the engines of the 20-year-old Boeing 737-200 aircraft operated by Alliance Air, an Indian Airlines subsidiary, en route from Calcutta to New Delhi was "a sheet of flame" as it made its landing approach, for the second time at 7.30 a.m. local time, having overshot Patna minutes earlier.

"The plane was shaking and smoke was billowing from the plane which was hurtling down from a height of around 150 feet," a local resident, Mr Suresh Rai, said. Around a mile short of the runway, he declared, the aircraft nose-dived, hit a mango grove adjoining a government residential colony on the airport's periphery and ploughed into two adjoining brick houses with a deafening explosion.

Locals said two families of 16 people, including four sisters, lived in the neighbouring houses destroyed by the aircraft, but their fate was not known.

Relatives of the passengers, police and airport workers mobbed the smouldering pile of metal wreckage minutes after the crash, screaming and crying as they tried to find survivors.

Hundreds of local residents formed a human chain to pass buckets of water.

Officials said the aircraft's "black box" or flight data recorder and voice recorder had been found and an investigation ordered into the accident. They dismissed eyewitness accounts that the engines had caught fire, saying that preliminary inquiries indicated that Capt Sohan Pal (35), the pilot, may have been flying too low.

They declared he may have "misjudged" the altitude while coming in to land despite "adequate" visibility conditions and a mechanically sound aircraft which had passed all its technical checks. All of the crew died.

The Civil Aviation Secretary, Mr A.H. Jung, said Capt Pal was "lower than he should have been" while other aviation experts said the pilot did not have sufficient power to climb once he realised he was short of the runway and almost certain to crash.