A Lufthansa cargo plane caught fire and split in half as it was landing at King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh Tuesday at 11.38 A.M., the airline and the civil aviation authority said. Lufthansa said in a statement that one of its MD-11 planes crashed and the German pilot and co-pilot, aged 39 and 29, had to leave the plane by emergency chutes. “Two crew members were taken to hospital to undergo treatment for minor injuries. The firefighters have contained the fire,” said a spokesman for the General Authority of Civil Aviation. There were no other crew members on board the aircraft. “The captain and the copilot are in good health; they only had minor injuries,” Khalid Al-Khaibri, the GACA spokesman was quoted as saying by a news agency. However, Al-Khaibri said the pilot reported to ground officials a fire in the cargo hold of the aircraft before landing. “The captain informed the tower that there was fire in the back of the plane,” he said. The airport immediately put ground rescue and fire teams on alert, he said. “The plane was close to the airport when it caught fire,” Riyadh airport official Fahd Al-Hamoud was quoted as saying by a news agency. “Its engines stopped working, then it crashed and split into two halves.” It took Civil Defense workers about three hours to contain the fire, he added. An eyewitness said the plane veered off a runway on landing. “It did not stop until the Royal Terminal runway. Soon after smoke started to emerge, followed by a fire,” he said. Michael Goentgens, a spokesman for Lufthansa's cargo division in Germany, said the MD-11 cargo plane coming from Frankfurt had an accident while trying to land at the airport in Riyadh, but he declined to comment on the cause. He also confirmed the two pilots aboard Flight 8460, which was carrying about 90 tons of unspecified cargo, were injured. However, Al-Hilal soccer club of Riyadh announced that the luggage of some its players was damaged in the fire. The aircraft, which has been heavily damaged, was on its way from Frankfurt to Hong Kong via Riyadh and Sharjah. Europe's biggest cargo carrier said it was sending a team of experts to Riyadh to help investigate the cause of the crash. The accident had not affected the overall flights operation at the airport. “It was business as usual at KKIA,” said an official of a foreign airline. The Lufthansa statement added that the MD-11 was first built in 1993 and bought by Germany's biggest airline, in 2004. The Arab satellite TV channel Al-Arabiya aired live footage from the airport showing the plane on fire and black smoke billowing into the sky.
