Epress.am News from Armenia
Investigators were trying to determine Wednesday what caused China’s first fatal passenger plane crash in almost six years, reports CNN.com.
A Henan Airlines flight with 96 people on board overshot a runway and crashed Tuesday night in the Yichun area of northern China, state media said. The plane broke into two pieces and burst into flames.
On Wednesday, the government downgraded the death toll from the crash from 43 to 42 after a body that was torn apart was previously counted twice, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Fifty-four people survived.
The investigators’ initial focus was to find the flight data recorder — commonly known as the “black box” — that might yield clues as to what caused the Brazilian-made Embraer 190 jet to crash land in heavy fog on a patch of grass about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) from the runway.
The black box was found on the ground Wednesday morning, Xinhua said.
The Henan Airlines flight had taken off from Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang province, on the 360-kilometer (225-mile) flight to Lindu Airport, about 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) from downtown Yichun, a city of about 1 million residents near the Russian border, Xinhua said.
A Yichun vice-mayor told Xinhua that most of those taken to hospitals did not have life-threatening injuries.