China crash runway

A nighttime flight into a remote Chinese city ended with a violent, shaking descent and then a crash near an airport that one major Chinese airline had previously judged unsafe for night landings. More than half the 96 people onboard survived, clambering over luggage as smoke filled the broken fuselage. The crash Tuesday in northeast China's Heilongjiang province killed 42 people and was the country's worst commercial air disaster in nearly six years. Among the dead were a husband-and-wife team of flight attendants, a 12-year-old girl, and midlevel economic development officials on their way to a conference in Yichun, a small city tucked amid boreal forests 90 miles (150 kilometers) from the Russian border. Investigators recovered two black boxes from the wreckage of the Henan Airlines Embraer 190 jet Wednesday and were waiting to question the pilot, Qi Quanjun, who survived but was badly injured, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Shortly before the crash, Qi told air traffic controllers he saw the runway lights and was preparing to land, Xinhua quoted an Yichun city official as saying. But fog shrouded the airport tucked into a valley, with visibility less than 2,000 feet (600 meters). Survivors described seeing nothing but blackness outside the windows as the plane slammed into grass and fell apart about 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) from the runway at Yichun city's Lindu Airport. The accident underscores the breakneck expansion of China's aviation industry in recent years and the struggles of regulators to keep up. Airports have proliferated as have small regional airlines, reaching into remote cities like Yichun, eager to develop tourism and other businesses to catch up with the country's economic boom.