China’s Tibet Airlines said all passengers and crew had been evacuated from an Airbus A319 plane that caught fire after an aborted takeoff in the southwestern city of Chongqing on Thursday. There were no deaths and only minor injuries among the 113 passengers and nine crew members on board, the airline said in a statement.
The incident came less than two months after the deadly crash of a China Eastern Airlines plane prompted the country’s aviation regulator to launch a safety crackdown.
An unverified video on social media showed a Tibet Airlines plane, an Air China subsidiary, with heavy smoke and flames billowing from the left side of the plane as passengers and crew walked away.
The plane involved is a nine-year-old A319, one of the smaller versions of the A320 family. It is powered by CFM56 engines from CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric and Safran, according to Airfleets.net. Tibet Airlines is a regional airline based in Lhasa. It has a fleet of 39 aircraft, including 28 A319s, according to Airfleets.net.
On March 21, a China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737-800 with 132 people on board crashed in the mountains of southern China, killing everyone on board. So far there have been few clues as to the cause of the accident.