Up 44 people are missing after a passenger plane crashed in a remote area of Afghanistan today.

A week of national mourning has been declared in Poland after the country's President died in a plane crash.

THE MD-82 plane that crashed in Madrid is part of the MD 80 series commonly seen in Irish airports. The aircraft series is regarded by industry watchers as having a good safety record.

A Congolese airliner trying to take off with about 80 people aboard careened off a runway, bursting into flames and killing at least 21 people in a busy market neighbourhood.

Congo fired its transport minister tonight as emergency workers extinguished the last flames from a plane crash which killed at least 50 people, finding still more bodies in the wreckage.

At least 25 people were killed when a cargo plane crashed in Congo’s capital seconds after take-off.

VENEZUELAN investigators yesterday picked through the wreckage of a plane that crashed with 160 people on board, trying to determine what caused the engines to fail and sent the jet plunging from the sky in the country’s deadliest air disaster in history.

Venezuelan investigators are picking through the shattered wreckage of a plane that crashed with 160 people on board, trying to determine what caused the engines to fail and sent the jet plunging from the sky in the country’s deadliest air disaster in history.

There is confusion today over the death toll in the Congo plane tragedy, where passengers were sucked out of the aircraft mid-air after a rear door swung open.

MORE than 120 passengers were sucked out of a transport plane to their deaths when its massive rear cargo door burst open at 33,000 feet over the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The survivors of a mid-air tragedy in which 129 people are believed to have died are being treated for shock.