This post is primarily for my Goma friends who may want to see more details on the location of the recent plane crash.
On Wednesday, I joined a MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) flight to Goma and Bukavu. We flew over Monday’s plane crash in a residential area of Goma. A Folker 50 plane of the Congolese private airline Compagnie Africaine d’Aviation (CAA) apparently came in too low during a fierce hail storm, hit a tower and crashed in the backyard of a house, killing seven and injuring three. Miraculously, no one on the ground was hurt.
I took photos from the air as we left Goma. Below are some of the pictures with marks to identify the crash site, a house with a blue roof that was hit before landing, a road where part of a wing landed which was removed by the time we flew over (based on a photo found online), and a tower that may have been hit (based on information from a UN friend) on the UN compound.
PHOTO 1 (Click on Photo to see larger)
The antenna the plane hit on the UN compound is off camera on the left of the photo, part of a wing fell into the street, a blue-roofed house was hit and ripped off part of the roof (a friend knows the people who were there when it hit), lava walls were knocked down and some trees flattened, and the plane landed in the yard of a house.
PHOTO 2
PHOTO 3
Two pilots looked at these photos and pointed out how the trees in the lower part of this photo look “burned” or dead and they speculated that it is from jet fuel which they said can kill plants quickly, in hours or days. The brown parts might be where the fuel spilled onto the trees.
PHOTO 4
Photo 5
Additional note on the airplane wing:
A reader just asked me about the wing of the airplane that can’t be seen in the above photos. It was removed by the time we flew over, but we found the location of where it had dropped by searching for the street using the picture below taken by Sinziana Demian the day after the accident. If you look at the walls and house in this picture, you can see that it is the location circled above, 2nd circle from the bottom. The tower circled in the photo above may not be the tower that was hit (the photo isn’t wide enough to tell), but it is very close as it’s in the UN compound on the lake.
Below is a photo I found on a UN website of the antenna that was hit on the UN base before a wing dropped in the street and the plane crashed:
hi! if u can please help me know which wing was found in the street (on 1st pic. u say wing droped in the street) thank you for your help.
JM
Hi JM, The wing was removed by the time we flew over Goma on Wednesday morning. At the bottom of the blog post, I’ve just now added a photo we found online that led us to the location where part of a wing fell in the street. Two MAF pilots helped to find the same street in my pictures by zooming in on the high resolution photos. See my new note at the bottom of the blog. The antenna that was hit is outside my photos, I believe. I found a picture that the UN took of the damaged antenna. It seem likely that by hitting that antenna, it damaged the wing which fell off seconds later into the street. We searched for other major plane parts in the photos (a second wing, engines, etc), but couldn’t find them so assumed that they had been removed already.