Australian airplane crash kills 15 people

CANBERRA, Australia – An airplane carrying 15 people slammed into a hillside in remote northeastern Australia on Saturday, killing everyone on board, authorities said.

A recovery operation was under way today on a rugged hillside in Queensland state where the twin-propeller plane crashed in Australia’s worst civil aviation disaster in almost four decades.

“We’ve just had a police officer winched in who has confirmed there are no signs of life,” state police spokeswoman Kirsten Roos told the Associated Press.

Peter Gibson of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority told Australian television’s Nine Network the plane had been flying in rain, low clouds and 23 mph winds when it crashed.

The twin-propeller Fairchild Metroliner, with two pilots and 13 passengers on board, was traveling to Lockhart River, an Aboriginal community of 350 people in Queensland, Jiggins said. The plane was en route from Bamaga, near the tip of the Cape York Peninsula, about 170 miles from Lockhart River.

The scheduled passenger flight of north Queensland-based airline Aero-Tropics had radioed that the plane was about to land before the crash, said police Superintendent Michael Keating.

The crash was Australia’s worst air disaster since two army Black Hawk helicopters collided near the Queensland city of Townsville, killing 18 people in 1996. It was also Australia’s worst civil air crash since 1968, when a plane crashed near Port Hedland in western Australia, killing 26.

Lockhart River is a former Anglican mission where Aborigines from across Cape York were placed in the 1920s until the outbreak of World War II, when they were told to return to their ancestral lands.

The mission was re-established as a community for Aborigines in 1947 and the church handed it to the Queensland government in 1964.

The tiny township has become known as the home of a critically acclaimed group of Aboriginal artists known as the Lockhart River Gang whose works sell for tens of thousands of dollars.