Up to 200 people were feared dead after a Brazilian TAM passenger plane skidded off the runway on landing and hit a fuel storage tank at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport Tuesday.

 

TAM airline company said that 176 passengers and crew were aboard the Airbus A320 flying from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil to Sao Paulo when it lost control and skidded off the wet runway.

 

The following is a chronology of major air crashes worldwide since the start of 2006:

 

Jan. 19: A Slovak An-24 military plane crashed into a Hungarian snowy mountain not far from the Slovakia border after starting its descent too early, killing 42 peacekeepers from a NATO mission in Kosovo and leaving only one survivor.

 

May 3: All 113 passengers and crew, including six children, on board an Armenian Airbus A-320 were killed when it crashed into the Black Sea off the Russian coast, as it tried to land in torrential rain.

 

July 9: A Sibir Airlines' Airbus A-310 flying from Moscow to Irkutsk veered off the runway at Irkutsk airport, killing 129 of the 203 people on board.

 

Aug. 22: A Pulkovo Airlines Tu-154 passenger jet, en route from the Russian Black Sea resort of Anapa to St Petersburg, crashed 50 km north of the east Ukrainian town of Donetsk, killing all 170 passengers and crew on board, with dozens of children among the victims.

 

Aug. 27: A Comair flight, carrying 47 passengers and three crewmembers, crashed near Lexington airport in the U.S. state of Kentucky, leaving only one survivor on board.

 

Sept. 29: A Brazilian airliner with 155 passengers on board crashed in the Amazon rainforest after a mid-air collision with a small aircraft.

 

Oct. 29: Only seven of the 104 people on board a Boeing 737 passenger plane survived when it crashed at Abuja airport, near the Nigerian capital.

 

Jan. 1, 2007: An Indonesian jetliner with 102 people aboard crashed into mountains in Indonesia's northeastern island of Sulawesi, killing at least 90 passengers.

 

May 5: A Kenya Airways Boeing 737-800 carrying 114 people crashed shortly after taking off from Douala airport in a heavy storm. No one survived.

 

(Xinhua News Agency July 19, 2007)