More than 100 feared dead in Indonesia plane crash

More than 100 people are feared dead after a military plane plowed into a residential area in northern Indonesia on Tuesday.

"For the moment we, know there were 113 people (on board). It looks like there are no survivors," Air Marshal Agus Supriatna told Metro TV in the Sumatra city of Medan, adding some of the passengers were air force families.

The giant Hercules C-130 plane exploded into flames as it slammed into several homes and a hotel in Medan, Indonesia's third-largest city, media outlets reported.

Television footage seen by the Associated Press showed the mangled wreckage of the C-130, a crumpled burning car and a shattered building that local media said was recently built and contained a spa, shops and homes. It was unclear if anyone was in the buildings at the time.

Smoke billowed from the site and several thousand people milled nearby. Rescue teams scrambled over the rubble, searching for survivors. The plane crashed shortly before midday local time, just two minutes after taking off from a nearby air force base.

Air Force spokesman Rear Marshal Dwi Badarmanto told the AP that 74 bodies had been recovered so far. He said about 30 of the dead have been identified and include air force personnel and members of their families. He said there is little hope of finding survivors. It is unclear how many people on the ground were killed.

Supriatna said the plane, which had a crew of 12, had traveled from the capital, Jakarta, and stopped at two locations before arriving at Medan.

Supriatna told the AP the pilot told the control tower that the plane needed to turn back because of engine trouble. "The plane crashed while it was turning right to return to the airport," he said.

Elfrida Efi, a receptionist at the Golden Eleven Hotel, told Reuters: "It passed overhead a few times, really low. There was fire and black smoke. The third time it came by it crashed into the roof of the hotel and exploded straight away."

Local resident Januar, 26, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told AFP: "I saw the plane from the direction of the airport and it was tilting already, then I saw smoke billowing."

The incident is the second plane crash in a Medan residential area in a decade. In September 2005, a Mandala Airlines Boeing 737 crashed shortly after taking off from the city's Polonia airport — now the Soewondo Air Force Base — killing 143 people.

Indonesia has a patchy civil aviation safety record and its cash-strapped air force has also suffered a string of accidents, the AP reported. Between 2007 and 2009, the European Union barred Indonesian airlines from flying to Europe because of safety concerns.

The country's most recent civilian airline disaster was in December, when an AirAsia jet with 162 people on board crashed into the Java Sea en route from Surabaya to Singapore. There have been five fatal crashes involving air force planes since 2008, according to the Aviation Safety Network, which tracks aviation disasters.