At least 9 survivors in Amazon plane crash

Updated at: 0808 PST, Saturday, October 31, 2009
BRASILIA: Indigenous tribesmen deep in the world's largest rainforest have found at least nine survivors after a Brazilian military transport plane crash-landed in a river in the Amazon, the air force said Friday. One person on the flight that went down on Thursday in far northwestern Brazil was found trapped in the plane and is presumed dead, while another went searching for help and is missing, the air force said. Members of the Matis, a tiny tribe of some 300 people first contacted by modern Brazilian officials in the 1970s, discovered the plane and its crew and passengers "in the middle of the Amazon jungle" between the Matis village of Aurelio and another tribe's village, the air force said in a statement. The C-98 Caravan, a single-propeller Cessna transport plane, lost radio contact Thursday 58 minutes into its flight from Cruzeiro do Sul, in northwestern Acre state, to the Amazonas town of Tabatinga, where the borders of Brazil, Colombia and Peru come together. The plane apparently crash-landed on the Itui river, a small tributary of the Amazon near the Peruvian border, and it was the pluck of the pilot that saved the lives of his passengers, according to a survivor. "We are happy to be alive," he told local indigenous health official Jose Francisco Correa de Araujo, according to news website. "The engine of the plane stopped, and we panicked, but the pilot managed to land the aircraft on the river."