Planes Crash in Tunisia and China

Rescue workers on two sides of the world scrambled to find survivors today after a passenger plane crashed in Tunisia and another went missing in the sea off north-eastern China.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that a Chinese airliner with 112 passengers and crew aboard crashed this evening near the port city of Dalian, 450km east of the capital, Beijing. The agency said rescue efforts were underway but gave no immediate information about any survivors.

The flight - en route from Beijing to Dalian - had taken off at 8:37pm (12.37GMT), and air traffic controllers lost contact with the flight less than an hour later. The crash is believed to have happened 20km from Dalian's airport.

Meanwhile an EgyptAir Boeing 737 with 55 people aboard went down in bad weather while trying to land near the capital, Tunis. Egyptian officials said there were at least 20 deaths, but witnesses also reported survivors. Viewed from a distance, the wreckage of the plane was resting on a hill in the area of a park about six kilometres from the Tunis-Carthage airport, and black smoke was rising from the site. Ambulances rushed to the scene, and at least 13 people were taken to hospital.

The control tower had lost contact with the plane a few seconds before the crash, just after a distress call from the pilot, according to the national news agency, TAP.

Egyptian officials in Tunis, speaking on Egyptian state TV, said there were 15 or 16 deaths and said the plane has been attempting an emergency landing. However, EgyptAir's vice president for safety, Shaker Qilada, denied reports that the plane was making an emergency landing.

"It was not an emergency landing. It was a normal landing approach," he said from Cairo.

He added that there were survivors and said "we have spoken to people on board" since the crash.

Weather was foggy and rainy at the time, with a sandy wind, called the "khamsin", blowing from the Sahara desert.