A BANGKOK Airways plane has crashed into a disused control tower on the holiday island of Samui, killing the pilot and injuring seven passengers, five seriously.

One passenger told ynetnews.com that there were 20 or 25 Israelis on board, but all escaped injury.

''The first rows were completely demolished,'' he was quoted as saying. ''Luckily, the Israelis sat relatively in the last rows of the plane and they all got out safe and sound.

''However, one pilot was killed and other passengers sitting in the front rows were injured.''

Most of the passengers were tourists and hospital sources told the BBC four Britons may be among those hurt.

Today's crash is bound to raise questions about safety on flights within Thailand, with the full official report on a fatal 2007 holiday crash on Phuket still unreleased.

The dead captain of Flight PG266 to Samui was named this afternoon by the Department of Civil Aviation as Chatchai Pansuwan.

DCA said five people had sustained serious injuries. Two others were injured, but not seriously.

Another 61 passengers on board the flight escaped unharmed, DCA said. Two stewards were also safe.

The flight was from Krabi. Planes fly from Krabi to Samui on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 1.40pm

The plane was an ATR 72, a twin-turboprop short-haul regional airliner built by the French-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR.

It seats up to 74 passengers in a single-class configuration and is operated by a two-pilot crew, according to Wikipedia.

On today's flight, there were 68 passengers, two pilots and two stewards.

The BBC reported that the flight skidded off the runway and hit a control tower.

''The plane just pinched the control tower but there was no fire,'' Sakchai Jorpalit, district chief of the Thai tourist island, told the French news agency AFP.

He said most of the injured were tourists, adding that some were hospitalised with non-life threatening injuries.

An airport official told the Associated Press that it was raining heavily when the plane landed

Earlier, an agency report described a mishap at a ''popular Thai holiday island.'' However.the island turned out to be Samui, not Phuket.

The region's worst modern air disaster was on Phuket on September 16, 2007, when a holiday flight crash-landed, resulting in the death of 90 passengers and crew.

Forty survivors suffered burns and injuries. The full report on the crash and its causes has yet to be released.

Pilot error was blamed, with intense weather conditions. A ''windshear'' is said to have forced the aircraft down into the tarmac as it came to land, with the pilot unable to recover in time.

With the full report as yet unreleased for reasons that have not been explained, today's crash is bound to raise more questions about safety standards on flights within Thailand.


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