A Tibet Airlines company plane caught fire this Thursday morning on the take-off runway of the airport in the central Chinese city of Chongqing, according to state television CCTV. According to this medium, the device has left the take-off runway when it was carrying out the maneuvers to leave for Lhasa (in the southwest of the country) and has caught fire.
For now, no victims have been reported, but there have been more than 40 minor injuries that have had to be taken to hospital.
Videos published by the local press show several fire trucks trying, with apparent success, to put out the fire. The videos also show dozens of people leaving the plane and fleeing across the runway, some of them relatively close to the area of fire, which appears to be concentrated in the front left of the plane.
According to the official Global Times newspaper, a total of 122 people (113 passengers and 9 crew members) were on the plane at the time of the accident. All of them, the publication points out, were evacuated “safely”.
The recordings show the plane completely glued to the runway from the bottom, since the landing gear is not visible. For the moment, Tibet Airlines has only indicated to the local press that it was waiting to receive more information about what happened and that “first level emergency plans” had been activated.
This is not the only aviation accident recorded in China recently, since on March 21 a China Eastern Boeing 737-800 that covered the Kunming-Canton route abruptly fell to the ground, causing the death of its 132 occupants. .
That incident ended a streak of almost 12 years without serious aviation accidents in the Asian country.
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