China sacks 3 senior officials after high-speed train crash (Reuters)

WENZHOU, China (Reuters) – China sacked three senior railway officials Sunday after a collision between two high-speed trains killed at least 43 people and raised new questions about the safety of the fast-growing rail network.

A bullet train Saturday night hit another express which lost power following a lightning strike, state media said, in the country's deadliest rail disaster since 2008.

The power failure knocked out an electronic safety system designed to alert trains about stalled locomotives on the line.

As rescue teams and firefighters with excavators searched for survivors, state television said a 4-year-old boy and a male toddler had been pulled alive from the wreckage.

It was not known how many people were on the trains, which collided on a bridge near the city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, some 860 miles south of Beijing.

"The task for us now is to clear the debris and also to check for survivors in those areas that we have not gone to," said 35-year-old rescue worker Wang Jun. "Also, we are trying to get the railway line to be operational again."

Authorities moved quickly to assuage public anger by sacking the head of the Shanghai railway bureau, his deputy and the bureau's Communist Party chief, the Railways Ministry said in a statement on its website (www.china-mor.gov.cn).

The three will "also be subject to investigation," the statement added.

Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, visiting the scene, "pledged that the investigators will find out the cause of the accident and those responsible will be seriously punished according to the law," the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Rescuers found more bodies Sunday afternoon, bringing the death toll to 43. Almost 200 people remain in hospital, 12 of them in critical condition, Xinhua said.

Two foreigners died in the accident, according to the semi-official China News Service, including a woman in her 20s.

Rail is the most popular method of long-distance transport in China and trains are usually crowded with as many as 1,000 passengers.

The reliability of China's rail network was called into question recently when the flagship Beijing-Shanghai high-speed line suffered a series of power outages soon after opening to great fanfare a month ago.

China's rail network has also been hit by a series of scandals. Three railway officials have been investigated for corruption this year, according to local media reports.

In February, Liu Zhijun was sacked as railways minister for "serious disciplinary violations." He led the rail sector's investment drive over the past decade.

Chinese internet users took to popular Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo to vent their anger about the accident, with some calling for Railways Minister Sheng Guangzu to resign, posting his picture online with a large red cross through it.

"The Railways Ministry should realize that passengers are not just little white mice," wrote Yang Chunxiao.

"Do you think officials are really trying to help? It's all for show," added A Cige.

"FLYING INTO THE AIR"

One train was heading from Beijing to the coastal city of Fuzhou, and the other was running from Hangzhou to Fuzhou.

Both trains were made by China South Locomotive and Rolling Stock Corp Ltd (CSR).

The force of the collision sent "the head of the train flying into the air," said Cai Qi, a 30-year-old villager who saw the accident and rescued five children, four women and one man. "Some of them had their hands or legs broken. Some were crushed inside debris and we pushed and carried them out."

"Suddenly, there was a loud bang," said 32-year-old survivor Yin Caohui. "After that, the train broke. It was all dark and we could not see anything."

A 31-year-old survivor, who gave his last name as Yu, said the train stopped suddenly and the lights immediately went off but the passengers "didn't think it was so serious."

"Only when we got down, we saw so many train carriages falling down," Yu said.

In 2008, an express train traveling from Beijing to the eastern coastal city of Qingdao derailed and collided with another train, killing 72 and injuring 416 people.

(Additional reporting by Aly Song in Wenzhou and Sally Huang and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing; Writing by Sui-Lee Wee and Ben Blanchard)

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Witness: Practice key to risky, high-speed shuttle landing (Reuters)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – I have watched as space shuttles nosedive toward the runway more than 100 times, knowing that there are no engines available to carry them back into the sky if something goes wrong.

When the ships glide home in a quiet countermove to their thunderous liftoff, it is not without drama.

Flawless touchdowns have come to seem routine since the inaugural shuttle flight in April 1981 but they are not a given. Landing safely is an overarching goal as NASA prepares for its final space shuttle mission -- and that is why Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson recently buckled in for his 1,400th or so practice run in a Shuttle Training Aircraft (STA).

I recently was among three reporters invited aboard the modified Gulfstream business jet that was a stand-in in for the shuttle on one of Ferguson's last training runs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It was a rare chance to travel aboard a NASA aircraft, let alone one piloted by shuttle astronauts.

"It's a clean airplane, it likes to glide and it has good thrust," said veteran astronaut Ken Cockrell, who served as Ferguson's instructor. "We have to ruin all that to make it fly like a shuttle."

Our aircraft soared out over the Atlantic Ocean through the calm, moonless sky for Ferguson's first approach. The former TOP GUN Navy pilot was to make nine practice landings for the training run, bringing his STA training tally to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,400 -- plus one actual shuttle landing.

The repetition is necessary because the shuttle drops through the air like a brick due to stubby wings that favor the aerodynamics of launch over landing.

"You don't fly your first (shuttle) flight until you've had 500 (STA) approaches," Cockrell said. "It's a dog-training routine. You do it many, many times until it becomes like the back of your hand."

At about 20,000 feet, I felt a gentle push out of my seat, a tantalizing sample of microgravity like the lift you get at the peak of a roller coaster ride.

Then we plunged toward the ground. The horizon, a thin ribbon of tangerine light left by the setting sun, twisted sideways in my window. Though we were warned about motion sickness, I felt only glee.

Ferguson was heading toward the shuttle's runway, a three-mile (5-km) concrete landing strip ringed by canals in the marshlands around the Kennedy Space Center.

HIGH-SPEED LANDINGS

Though the runway was illuminated by xenon floodlights, they were useless at high altitude. Instead, the pilot relied on other visual cues and navigation aids laid out along two pathways home -- one coming from the southeast, which ends on Runway 33, and one from the northwest to Runway 15. Shuttle pilots practice both approaches.

"It becomes like second nature so that when you become scared you don't have to worry about one part of it, which is how to fly the approach. You know it," Cockrell said.

For the third and fourth practice landings, I moved to the front of the plane and took up what I hoped to be a stable stance for the steep glides to come. To my left, I could see the handle that opens the stairway door, which Cockrell had warned us not to touch.

"It's possible that if you manage to get the door to crack open a little bit, the slipstream is going to pull it open and knock it off or something and you're going to go with it, so don't do that," he said.

Instead, I planted my left hand on the metal frame behind Ferguson's head, stepped my right leg back and bent my knees, praying I would not tumble into the cockpit. Then, the moment of microgravity lifted my whole body.

I managed some peeks through the windows before the rude slap of gravity returned my concentration to balancing.

As we careened toward ground, coming in seven times steeper than a commercial airliner, the runway looked impossibly small and surrealistic, a dollhouse version of real life.

Shuttle landings occur at about 230 miles per hour and it took us less than 30 seconds to reach that point after the STA started to dive.

We hovered over the runway, simulating the exact view that Ferguson will have when he makes the touchdown in the real, taller shuttle. Cockrell then pushed a button to take the plane out of simulation mode, returning the engines to forward thrust, and we swooped back into the sky for another run.

"Everyone remarks that when they get the chance to land the real orbiter, it's like flying the STA only smoother," Cockrell said. "The STA is a lighter airplane and tends to respond to gusts. You have to work harder to fly the path."

To mimic the shuttle, the pilot drops the Gulfstream's landing gear down when the plane is still flying at 288 mph, positions the plane to begin a dive and opens up thrust reversers, which redirect the engine exhaust forward, rather than back, slowing the aircraft.

With the plane now locked in shuttle simulation mode, it's up to the shuttle pilot to glide it back toward the runway.

"It's nothing like a night aircraft carrier landing -- I can tell you that -- but it's a good thrill," Cockrell said.

"It's fairly busy although once you've done it a few hundred times it's fun."

Ferguson and his crew are scheduled to launch Atlantis on July 8 for a 12-day mission at the International Space Station. The flight is the 135th and last in the shuttle program.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Bill Trott)

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