HANOI, April 8 (Xinhua) -- A military aircraft crashed to a field in this capital city on Tuesday morning, killing all five people on board.
"When my wife and I were working at our paddy rice field at nearly 10:00 this morning, I saw a white plane staggering past a school and landing on a paddy rice field some hundreds of meters away from us. After the head of the plane stuck in mud, the plane exploded without fire. After that, fire trucks and ambulances with many police and army officers came. They took the five bodies away," said one of the few witnesses who called himself Bao from Ta Thanh Oai commune, rural Thanh Tri district.
Parts of four dead men were scattered dozens of meters away from the accident site, and only one body was nearly intact, the young farmer having a big black mole on his face said, making a fright gesture.
The only big part of the plane on the field is its tail covered with mud. The windy weather sent the smell of oil from the accident site far away.
"The plane was noisy. It went past the school, a graveyard, a railway and an electric pole before landing on the field," the farmer's pregnant wife named Dung said, adding that the aircraft moved some one hundred meters on the field before exploding.
According to talks among some local army officers, the plane was An-26, a Russia-made twin-engine light turboprop transport aircraft, and the five victims were from the Transport Regiment under Vietnam's Air Force and Air Defense Service.
"Oh, it's heartbreaking. My colleges, you were safe in storms when you conducted flights to give foodstuffs to people in the central region. But, now you died in a training flight," an army officer bemoaned.
"They are heroes because they must have tried their best to steer the plane far from buildings and people here. The plane staggered, so one of two engines must have failed," the officer said.
According to a local air force officer who declined to be named, Vietnam received a total of 45 An-26 planes after 1975, of which nine, including the recently exploded one, are still in use.
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