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Passenger plane crashes near Manila

Philippine coast guard divers search for victims of the Laoag Air flight 585 plane crash in Manila Bay yesterday. The plane carrying 29 passengers and 5 crew crashed into the bay after takeoff from nearby Manila. PHOTO: AFP

A passenger plane, trailing smoke from its left engine, plunged into Manila Bay shortly after taking off from the Philippine capital yesterday, with 18 of the 34 people aboard killed or missing and presumed dead.

Sixteen people, including two Australians, were rescued.

One Filipino survivor said he held onto one of the passengers to push himself up through the water but did not immediately realize he was clinging to a dead person.

Hours after the Fokker plane crashed into murky waters around 11m deep, only 14 bodies -- some still strapped in their seats -- had been recovered by rescue teams.

They included the bodies of two Australians and one British national, officials said.

Coast guard chief Vice-Admiral Ruben Lista said rescuers had shifted from a search-and-rescue phase to "search and retrieval operations," suggesting all hope of finding four others still missing had been abandoned. They included two other Australians and another British national.

Amateur video footage showed a trail of smoke from the left engine on the high-winged Fokker 27 plane just before it crashed into the bay, after taking off from Manila for the gambling center of Laoag, 400km north of the capital.

The plane had been airborne for three minutes when it crashed about 1km from shore after apparently suffering engine trouble, the Air Transport Office (ATO) said, discounting sabotage as a cause.

A woman who had been walking along Manila Bay with her children told local radio she saw the plane crash.

Tail split off

"First I saw black smoke, then suddenly the tail portion split off and the rest of the plane sank into the bay. I saw one man waving a white piece of cloth. Later, I could not see him any more," she said.

Four of the dead were children, including an 11-year-old boy whose body was found still bound to his seat. The plane carried 29 mostly Filipino passengers and five crew.

The survivors included the pilot and co-pilot.

Australian survivor Steve Thompson, 25, his arms and legs covered in bandages, told reporters the pilot warned passengers to brace themselves before the plane went down.

"The plane crashed, that's what happened. I really don't want to talk about it," he said.

A police tally showed another Australian, Bryan Forester, also survived.

"We understand that there were at least six Australians on board the aircraft, five from Sydney and one from Brisbane," the Australian embassy in Manila said in a statement.

The embassy only referred to one Australian survivor who had been identified so far and said he had been treated in hospital and released.

More than two dozen boats, including Navy craft, outrigger canoes belonging to fishermen and pleasure craft from the nearby Manila Yacht Club, converged on the crash site but the waters only yielded soaked luggage and metal fragments.

Recovery effort

Divers pulled the dead body of a young boy from the sea and tenderly lifted him into the lap of a rescuer in an inflatable dinghy, who cradled the body as the boat moved away.

"My husband took three of the women [survivors] and we loaded them into our car," said Nerissa Abrico who was jogging along the bay when she witnessed the crash.

"I was cradling one of them because she was so weak ... . She said all she kept thinking about were the children on the plane."

Laoag is popular with tourists from China and Hong Kong. It has one of the largest casinos in the Philippines and has direct air links with Hong Kong.

This was the second crash of a Fokker aircraft within a week. Twenty of the 22 passengers and crew died at Luxembourg's international airport on Nov. 6 when a twin-engine Fokker 50 smashed into a field in thick fog.
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