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NEWS HOME
> WORLD NEWS

Tuesday Aug 21 10:03 AEST

All safe after plane inferno

Monday Aug 20 12:22 AEST

A Taiwanese passenger plane burst into fire moments after landing in southern
Japan but all passengers and crew made a dramatic escape as flames engulfed the
jet.

Giant flames and plumes of black smoke erupted from the China Airlines jet
just eight minutes after it had landed from Taipei at Naha airport on Okinawa
island.

Firefighters sprayed hoses full of foam on the aircraft, which turned into
little more than a charred skeleton that had collapsed into pieces, television
footage showed.

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Two people were taken to hospital
but the extent of their injuries was not clear, a fire department spokesman
said.

The blaze was
triggered by a fire in an engine, officials said.

"When the fire broke out there was a huge bang and passengers were still in
the midst of evacuating," witness Toshimasa Yamamoto told Tokyo Broadcasting
System.

"When the passengers appeared to be finishing the evacuation, the fire
engulfed the entire plane. It really was a close call," he said.

All 157 passengers were safe, as were the two pilots and six crew members,
officials said.

"All 157 passengers evacuated through the emergency slides," said Akihiko
Tamura, a transport ministry official in Tokyo.

"As for the crew members, we have confirmed that all eight are alive. There
is information that one of them is injured and we are still looking into how
serious the injury is," he told a news conference.

Authorities had earlier said they could not confirm the whereabouts of four
crew members.

In Taipei, China Airlines also confirmed the safety of all passengers. The
airline put the passenger number at 155, not including two infants without
tickets.

"Everything was normal, including take-off and landing, until the pilots were
told the airplane was on fire," China Airlines spokesman Johnson Wang told
reporters.

He said the Boeing 737-800 from Taiwan had landed on Okinawa as
scheduled.

"Then the crew on board immediately took the due procedure to evacuate all
the passengers," Wang said.

Once the flames were doused, firefighters in protective gear could be seen
climbing into the ruins of the aircraft searching for any survivors or
victims.

The fire broke out at 10:35 am and lasted for nearly an hour, officials
said.

The transport ministry said it started in an engine on the left wing of the
plane, and that there were no indications it was a terrorist attack.

Okinawa, a subtropical island which lies closer to Taiwan than Tokyo, is a
popular tourist destination and is ordinarily packed with Japanese visitors
during the ongoing summer holiday season.

The incident will likely rekindle memories in Japan of a major crash by a
China Airlines plane in 1994. In that incident, 264 people were killed as the
Airbus A300 nosedived on landing in the central Japanese city of
Nagoya.

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