55 Confirmed Lost

Just days after China touted improvements in the safety record of its civil aviation fleet, a China Eastern CRJ-200 went down in a frozen lake Sunday. All 53 people on board were lost, as well as two on the ground.

The Bombardier regional jet went down in an icy lake just seconds after taking off from the airport at Baotou, the regional capital of Inner Mongolia, en route to Shanghai. Of the dead, 47 were passengers and six were crew members.

Witnesses told the official Xinhua news agency the aircraft exploded in a fireball just after departing the ground. A spokesman for China's civil aviation authority, however, said there was no information available about the circumstances surrounding the accident.

It was an embarrassing blow to Chinese civil aviation, which had just boasted a record five million hours of accident-free passenger flight in the wake of a string of tragedies in the early 1990s.

There was no immediate indication, however, whether the aircraft had suffered some sort of catastrophic malfunction, was the victim of a terrorist attack or had been mishandled by the flight crew. Government investigators were on the way to the crash site Sunday night.

FMI: www.caac.gov.cn