A plane carrying two foreign nationals, a doctor, and a nurse crashed and burst into flames shortly after it took off from an airport in Manila, Philippines. All eight passengers and crew members on board were killed during the crash on Sunday night.
The plane was on a chartered flight to Japan arranged by Philippine-based chartered flight company Lionair, not to be confused with Indonesia's Lion Air airline. The light aircraft was used as an air ambulance by the Philippine health department for the flight.
The Manila International Airport Authority mentioned confirmed in a statement that none of the passengers had survived and that they are going to be closing to runway to conduct further investigation into the crash.
The deputy director-general of the country's Civil Aviation Authority, Donald Mendoza, announced that all of Lionair's planes will be grounded amid the investigation. Mendoza told reporters that the crash is "quite alarming" and that they will be looking into the flight records to determine what had caused the accident.
First responders on the scene of the crash, including personnel from the Philippine Red Cross, revealed that the airplane had exploded upon crashing. A huge fire immediately followed engulfing the plane. Firefighters rushed to the scene and quickly doused the fire but all that was left was the plane's metal carcass after the fire was put out.
The eight people on board included the pilot, two crew members, a flight medic, a doctor, a nurse, a Canadian national, and an American national. As of this writing, authorities have not yet confirmed whether any of the passengers were patients infected with Covid-19 that were being airlifted for treatment overseas.
Flights using Lionair's aircraft are currently being used by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine in its fight against the coronavirus disease in the Philippines. The leading agency in the fight against the outbreak uses the planes to transport supplies and medical workers to different parts of the archipelago.
The company currently has several contracts with the government, with its planes used by multiple agencies. Amid the outbreak, the company's planes were contracted into the government's anti-coronavirus program. Apart from ferrying supplies and medical staff, the planes are also used as air ambulances to transport patients in need of immediate medical attention.
The last crash that occurred involving the charter company's planes happened in September of last year. Another light aircraft had crashed in the suburban province of Laguna, just south of the nation's capital. The crash killed all nine people on board.
