Air crash in Africa kills more than 80

A plane crashed Tuesday shortly after taking off from the Goma airport in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing 83 passengers and crew on board, a foreign ministry spokesman said.
The Hewa Bora Airways DC-9 was heading from the city of Goma in the eastern mountains to the central city of Kisangani when it plummeted into a neighborhood near the runway, spokesman Antoine Ghonda said.
The plane went down shortly after 3 p.m. (9 a.m. ET) and was still on fire an hour later, U.N. spokesman Kemal Saiki said in Goma.
The United Nations and Red Cross are helping with the rescue effort, which is hampered by the "basic, if nonexistent" equipment in the impoverished country, Saiki said.
Hewa Bora Airways is a private Congolese airline that aviation authorities in Belgium recently suspended for safety violations, said foreign ministry spokesman Antoine Ghonda. The airline is based in the capital, Kinshasa.
Before its suspension, Hewa Bora had operated a weekly flight to Belgium, Ghonda said.
Congolese authorities had not suspended the airline. "I'm quite sure they're going" to after this week's crash, Ghonda added.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, has a dismal aviation record. There have been 10 plane crashes there since February 2007, resulting in 76 deaths, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
Ghonda said the cause of Tuesday's crash is under investigation but initial indications point to an overloaded cabin. He said weather was not a factor.
Saiki said air travel is one of the few ways to get around the Congo.
"This is the third-largest country in Africa, as big as Western Europe, and yet you don't even have 2,000 miles of roads," Saiki said. "So basically most of the transportation in such a big country is done by air."