Yesterday, at 12:20 p.m., a seaplane carrying 10 people crashed into a
Shanghai bridge, killing five people aboard and injuring the other
five.
Shortly after taking off from the Jinshan City Beach, the plane hit
the No. 7835 Bridge of the Shanghai-Hangzhou Expressway. The moment that
the plane crashed into the bridge was caught on camera.
The crashed aircraft was a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan EX
propeller seaplane manufactured by the American company Cessna. It cost
30 million yuan. The pilot, aged 63, had 46 years of flight experience
and had accumulated over 30 thousand hours of flight time. The cause of
the crash is still under investigation.
The seaplane was owned by Joy General Aviation. It was on a trial
flight for the company’s latest proposed sightseeing route from Jinshan
to Zhoushan. On board the plane were two pilots and eight passengers,
most of them journalists invited to report on the opening of the new
route, The Paper reports.
One of the journalists on board, surnamed Song, said that he pushed
four passengers out of the back of the crashed plane before climbing out
himself. “The people at the front were beyond help,” Song told reporters.
By 2:20 p.m. all of the passengers had been rushed to the hospital. Five of them were pronounced dead.
