Chile military aircraft disappears with 38 on board

Santiago: Chile’s Air Force said on Tuesday one of its cargo planes had crashed with 38 people on board after going missing in an isolated area between South America and the Antarctic, adding that a rescue team was searching for survivors.

The Hercules C130 aircraft took off at 4:55 p.m. (1955 GMT) on Monday from the southern city of Punta Arenas in Chilean Patagonia and was heading to a base in Antarctica, but operators lost contact with the plane shortly after 6:00 p.m. The Air Force said in a statement it had yet to locate the military cargo plane or determine whether there were any survivors but said it had concluded the plane must have crashed given the number of hours it had been missing.