AN AGEING Indonesian airliner was engulfed in flames after a failed take off from a Japanese airport yesterday, killing three people and leaving 100 injured and a dozen missing. Japanese police confirmed there were 272 survivors among 275 people who were aboard.
Survivors, some with their hair singed, made a miracle escape from the blazing passenger cabin after the aircraft careered off the runway and across a public road - before coming to a halt.
There were 260 passengers and 15 crew on the flight from Fukuoka airport bound for Denpasar, main city of the Indonesian resort of Bali, and Jakarta.
A Japanese government spokesman said 12 passengers had still to be accounted for and there was concern they might be in the rear most section of the aircraft which rescue workers had been unable to enter yet because of the heat.
Panic broke out on the 18 year old DC-10 as first smoke and then flames spread through the passenger cabin which was packed with mainly Japanese holidaymakers, including honeymooners, bound for Bali.
The fire started from the port side of the cabin. We tried to follow the evacuation directions from the flight attendant but that was the way the flames were coming from," a young male passenger told television stations.
Survivors said the aircraft lifted off just a few metres into the air from the runway and then suddenly crashed back at the end of the runway with one or two jarring bumps.
The aircraft skidded off the runway over a road open to regular pedestrian and car traffic and came to a halt on a grassy buffer zone on the other side only several hundred metres away from houses.
Its landing gear and the two wing engines broke off, ending up dozens of yards from the airliner.
Since its debut in the mid 1970s, the McDonnell Douglas built aircraft had been plagued by a series of crashes, but the problems were reported to have been solved by the following decade. The last DC-10 was produced in 1989.
Some passengers flung themselves down emergency escape shutes with their hair catching fire as flight attendants helped them to flee. Others crawled through cracks in the fuselage on to the aircraft's wings and jumped to the ground.
All but two of the passengers where Japanese, a transport ministry official said.
Some passengers said the flight attendants did their best but there was chaos in the evacuation because they could speak only a little Japanese.
Within 30 minutes of take off the fire had destroyed the passenger cabin, with flames leaping up to 10 feet into the air.
About 30 fire engines frantically sprayed 10am on to the burning fuselage as passengers were still jumping out.
One female passenger said: "I did not know where the emergency exits were when the aircraft stopped. People were falling down.
It was Japan's first fatal passenger air accident since an April 1994 China Airlines airbus crash at Nagoya airport in which 264 people died.