June 21, 2011
SEOUL (AFP) - A military training plane crashed in South Korea on Tuesday, killing an instructor and a trainee on board, an air force spokesman said.
The single-engined propeller plane ploughed into a rice paddy 1.6 kilometres (one mile) short of the runway as it came in to land near the air force academy in Cheongwon county, 120 kilometres south of Seoul, the spokesman said.
"The plane was flying lower than usual and glided over a hill before its landing wheels got entangled in power lines. It flipped over and crashed," an eyewitness was quoted as saying.
An investigation was under way into the cause of the accident.
The Russian-made Ilyushin II-103 aircraft is one of the main training planes used by the South Korean air force. The South received 23 of them in 2004 from Russia as part-repayment of loans.
