Two crew-members on board a cargo plane that crashed in an uninhabited area in Dubai have been killed in the accident, media reports quoting local officials said Friday.
The plane involved in the accident was Boeing 747-400 aircraft operated by United Parcel Service Inc., the company confirmed shortly after the news of the crash emerged.
"UPS Flight 6 from Dubai, to Cologne, DE, a 747-400 with two crew-members on board crashed on takeoff," the US-based cargo company said in the statement, without confirming any casualties in the accident.
UPS said the flight had crashed shortly after take-off from Dubai International Airport just before 5 pm local time, but did not provide further information on the incident.
"Safety is a key priority for UPS," Airline & International Operations Manager Bob Lekites said in a statement posted on the company's website after the crash.
"This incident is very unfortunate and we will do everything we can to find the cause. Our thoughts go out to the crew-members involved in the incident and their families," Lekites said.
"We will also release more information as it becomes available, in cooperation with government authorities. We will not speculate about the cause. Until then, we ask for your patience in this difficult time," he added in the statement.
Despite UPS' refusal to confirm the casualties in the crash, U.A.E.'s official WAM news agency reported late Friday that the bodies of two pilots had been recovered from the wreckage of the plane.
The WAM news agency had reported earlier that the aircraft came down in an unpopulated desert area in Dubai, one of seven semi-autonomous emirates that make up the U.A.E. The crash reportedly occurred in an unpopulated area between the Emirates Road and Al Ain highway.
Meanwhile, several news agencies reported that the pilots had reported a fire soon after take-off and were diverted to a government-owned landing facility in the desert by the air-controllers. Some reports even suggested that the plane had caught fire before it crashed into the ground inside the fence of a military air base, but their claims are yet to be confirmed.
Separately, Dubai's General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) said all measures have been taken to extinguish the fire at the accident site, adding that the "concerned authorities are conducting necessary investigations to identify the cause of the crash."
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