Kids among 17 killed in US plane crash

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LOS ANGELES, Mar 23 (Agencies): US federal investigators Monday searched for possible causes of a crash of a small plane that went down in the northern state of Montana killing all 17 people on board, many of them children.
"We think that it was probably a ski trip for the kids," Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus told the news agency, adding that preliminary reports showed 17 people were killed when the plane plunged into a cemetery.
The plane, a single engine turboprop, was heading from Oroville, California, just north of San Francisco on a 900-mile (1,500-kilometre) journey to Bozeman, Montana.
However, at some point "they diverted into Butte (Montana) where it crashed ... 500 feet (150 meters) short of the runway" of a local airport, FAA spokesman Les Dorr said.
Fergus said the crash occurred at around 2:30 pm (2030 GMT), just south of the Bert Mooney Airport in Butte, about 130 kilometres west of Bozeman.
He said the plane "crashed into Holy Cross cemetery, about 150 metres from the airport while attempting to land."
Neither spokesman speculated on the cause of the crash or on weather conditions prevalent at the accident site.
Dorr said a team of investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board was heading to the area.
"We watched this plane just take a nose-dive right into the cemetery," witness Martha Guidoni told CNN. A picture she snapped of the accident scene showed towering flames shooting up behind a cemetery and one of a series of towering trees ablaze.
She and her husband Steve rushed to the scene of the crash to see if anybody could be helped, but she said: "We were too late. There was nothing to help."
Steve Guidoni said when he got to the crash site "everything was on fire.
He said the plane left a hole six metres deep in the ground.
Aviation attorney Mary Schiavo, a former federal inspector, told CNN she was familiar with the type of aircraft and said it was not certified to carry such a large load.
Meaanwhile, a FedEx cargo plane smashed into a runway and burst into a ball of fire while attempting to land at Tokyo's main international airport Monday, killing the American pilot and copilot. Investigators believe wind shear, or a sudden gust of wind, may have been a factor.
Questions were also being raised about the safety of the MD-11, a wide-body airliner built by McDonnell Douglas and based on the DC-10.
The flight from FedEx's hub in Guangzhou, China, appeared to bounce after its initial touch down, and then skipped along the main runway at Narita Airport before flipping over and coming to a fiery halt, footage from airport security cameras showed.
Firefighters and rescuers immediately swarmed the MD-11 plane but the pilot and copilot - Kevin Kyle Mosley, 54, and Anthony Stephen Pino, 49 - were killed. Mosley lived in Hillsboro, Oregon, while Pino was from San Antonio, Texas, according to online records at the Federal Aviation Administration.
They were the only two people aboard.
Investigators said the accident may have been caused by low-level turbulence or "wind shear," sudden gusts that can lift or smash an aircraft into the ground during landing, said Kazuhito Tanakajima, an aviation safety official at the Transport Ministry.
Unusually strong winds of up to about 76 kilometres per hour were blowing through Narita City Monday morning around the time of the crash, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
But Tanakajima said the wind speed at the time of the accident was not enough to be considered dangerous, unless wind shear was involved.
Japanese media reported that Monday's was the first fatal crash at Narita Airport. It is Japan's second-busiest airport, after Tokyo's Haneda Airport, which is used primarily for domestic flights.