Story ID: 
Congo Boeing 727 Crash Kills 53
By: Charles Alcock
Caption: At least 53 people were killed when a Boeing 727 operated by Hewa Boro Airways crashed at Kisangani Airport in the Democratic Republic of Congo on July 8.
Word Count: 135
At least 53 people were killed when a Boeing 727 operated by Hewa Boro Airways crashed at Kisangani Airport in the Democratic Republic of Congo on July 8. The accident happened at around 2.30 p.m. local time as the airliner tried to land in reported bad weather after a flight from Kinshasa, the capital of the central African country.
According to Hewa Boro CEO Stavros Papaioannou, 57 people were rescued alive from the wreckage, which lay in dense jungle almost 700 feet from Kisangani’s runway.
All airlines in the Democratic Republic of Congo are on a European Union blacklist, which bans them from flying in Europe’s airspace. Hewa Boro, which now has a fleet of seven aircraft, has had five crashes since it was formed in 1994, and two of these involved fatalities.