One of the biggest air travel market in the world, China was the scene of yet another plane crash in just a few weeks. On Thursday, a Tibet Airlines Airbus A319 caught fire after aborting takeoff at Chongqing Airport, in the central region of the country.
The aircraft was carrying 113 passengers and nine crew bound for Nyingchi Airport as part of Flight 9833. All occupants managed to escape, but 40 of them were injured, according to preliminary information – the jet was lost.
The A319 MSN 5157 and registration B-6425 was acquired by Tibet Airlines and had almost 10 years of use. The Lhasa-based carrier was founded in 2010 and has 38 aircraft, all supplied by Airbus, including 27 A319s, six A320s and five A330-200s.
Accident not yet clarified
The runway excursion in Chongqing comes about 50 days after a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 crashed in the Guangxi region killing all 132 people on board.
Until then, serious accidents in China were rare for years. The China Eastern jet episode remains shrouded in mystery as for many analysts an aircraft at this stage of flight would hardly enter a fatal dive for technical reasons.
The CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) found the two black boxes, but so far there is no more likely hypothesis. The two flight recorders were sent to the US to have their contents recovered.
