The latest accident occured in Chittagong yesterday as a DC-10 aircraft from Dubai with 201 passengers and 14 crew skidded off the runway.

According to official sources, the Biman flight BG-048 that left for Dhaka via Chittagong at 2:15am local time skidded off 12 feet off the runway soon after it landed at 8:37am with one of its engines on fire. Only five passengers were slightly injured.

Earlier on June 8, a Bangladeshi fighter trainee pilot of Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) crashed his plane into a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the capital, killing one person and injuring four others.

The Chinese-made F-7 plane on a training mission came down at midday on the Uttara residential area, the military source said. The pilot ejected with minor injuries just 100 yards away from the flaming wreckage.

The house onto which the jet had crashed was completely destroyed, while two adjacent houses were partly damaged.

Earlier on August 5, 1984, a Fokker F-27 Friendship 600 aircraft of the national flag carrier crashed killing 49 people on board, the highest number of casualties so far in a single plane crash. The aircraft fell into a water body, 550 metres off the runway.

On February 10, 1972, five crewmembers on board a Biman flight were killed when a Douglas DC-3 aircraft crashed. It was the country's first air accident.

Four crewmembers of a Fokker F-27 flight escaped unhurt when it crash-landed in a field near Savar Bazar during a test flight on November 18, 1979. The accident occurred as both engines of the aircraft caught fire while landing from an altitude of 8000 feet on completion of the flight.

On December 22, 1997 a Fokker-28 with 89 people aboard crash-landed in Sylhet, leaving 17 injured. The aircraft landed on its belly in a paddy field, 3 km from the runway, failing to land at the Sylhet airport due to heavy fog.

An Airbus with 220 passengers including nine children on board narrowly averted an accident just before take-off from the Sylhet airport on February 8 this year. Detecting a mechanical fault, the pilot of the Sylhet-Dhaka flight immediately aborted the take-off and brought the aircraft back to the terminal.

On April 2, 2003, a severe storm with a wind-speed of up to 111 km per hour damaged three Airbus A-310s, a Boeing-737 and a Fokker F-28 aircraft at the Zia International Airport in Dhaka.

Moreover, an Air Parabat (private airliner) flight from Ishwardi airport crash-landed on its belly in a field near Savar due to some problems in the two-engine Walter M-601E plane on June 27, 1998. Five crew and two passengers on board escaped unhurt.

Two trainee pilots died when a Cessna C-150 training flight of Parabat's flying academy crashed on September 27, 1998.

Before independence, a Cargolux, Canada Air CL-44J flight crashed into a farmhouse near Dhaka airport while taking off on December 2, 1970.

A Macdonald Douglas-built DC-3 aircraft of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) crashed in Charlakhi Island in the Bay of Bengal, killing all the 20 passengers and four crew on July 1, 1957.