JAKARTA: A Boeing 737-300 jetliner swaying violently through a monsoonal downpour with apparent engine failure has crash-landed in Indonesia killing one flight attendant.
The Garuda Indonesia plane - with 54 passengers and six crew aboard - came down on the Bengawan Solo River, that cuts through densely populated farmland on Indonesia's main island of Java about 500km east of Jakarta.
Local villagers immediately rushed to the crash site and helped the survivors wade through one-metre deep water from the plane to the banks of the river.
"To survive this is a miracle, especially for my pregnant wife," one of the passengers, Farhan Sunkar, was quoted as saying by El-Shinta radio.
"We landed hard but I only realised it was a crash landing when I saw the water."
Sunkar said he and his wife escaped from the fuselage, which was still in one piece, through an emergency exit.
Hospital officials said seven other people on board were seriously injured and were being treated in the nearby city of Solo. Several others were lightly injured.
The state Antara news agency quoted another passenger, Mawardi, as saying the plane's engines stopped working before it crash-landed. Like many Indonesians Mawardi uses only one name.
He said the aircraft was rocking from side to side as it reduced altitude.
The plane had been on a flight from the tourist island of Lombok to the city of Yogyakarta, about 25km west of the crash site.
Police Sergeant Petrus Sartono said the plane was sitting on its bottom on the river bed. However, most of the fuselage was above the waterline.
A Garuda official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it appeared at least four foreigners were on the plane.
He said officials were checking the passenger list for foreign-sounding names as they did not have a list of their nationalities because it was a domestic flight.
An airline official said it was not known what went wrong on flight GA-421. The crash happened 20 minutes before it was scheduled to land.
The location of the emergency landing is in one of the most heavily populated rural areas in the world, home to hundreds of thousands of people.
It is likely the pilot chose the 25-metre-wide river for the landing as it was the only area not covered by houses or rice fields.
It was the second emergency landing by an Indonesian-owned Boeing 737 in three days.
On Monday, seven people were injured when a Lion Air passenger jet crash-landed immediately after taking off from an airport near the town of Pekanbaru, on Sumatra island.
Today's accident was the latest in a string suffered by Garuda in recent years.
In 1997, a Garuda Airbus A-300 approaching Medan Airport in north Sumatra crashed into a jungle and exploded while trying to land in thick smoke caused by forest fires. All 234 aboard are killed.