PHUKET, Thailand (AP) -- A passenger plane filled with foreign tourists crashed Sunday as it tried to land in pouring rain on the island of Phuket, splitting in two and bursting into flames, officials said. At least 87 people were killed.

The budget One-Two-Go Airlines domestic flight OG269 was carrying 123 passengers and seven crew members from the capital, Bangkokm to Phuket — popular among tourists for its pristine beaches and one of the areas hardest hit by the 2004 tsunami.
Survivors described their escape from the airplane’s windows as fires and smoke consumed the plane.
“I saw passengers engulfed in fire as I stepped over them on way out of the plane,” Parinwit Chusaeng, a survivor who suffered minor burns, told the Nation television channel. “I was afraid that the airplane was going to explode so I ran away.”
Wallop Thainua, the country’s deputy health minister, said he received a report that 87 people were killed in the crash, many of their bodies laid out in an airport building.
Officials at the scene said the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 crashed in a downpour, skidded off the runaway and broke in two.
Officials said it was too early to establish the cause of the crash, but some said weather was likely a factor.
“The visibility was poor as the pilot attempted to land. He decided to make a go-around but the plane lost balance and crashed,” said Chaisak Angsuwan, director general of the Air Transport Authority of Thailand. “It was torn into two parts.”
Local television reports showed parts of the twisted and smoking wreckage sitting off to the side of the runaway. Masked rescue workers converged on the plane, carrying away bodies wrapped in white sheets.
Lt. Gen. Amporn Charuchinda, chief of the police forensic bureau, said that the authorities might move some of the dead bodies to a mortuary in Phang Nga province where some of the tsunami victims were kept. Some 8,000 people were killed in Phuket in the 2004 disaster.
Sunday’s crash is the country’s deadliest aviation accident since Dec. 11, 1998, when 101 people were in the crash of Thai Airways plane at Surat Thani, 330 miles south of Bangkok. Forty-five people survived.
Jikarat Wongtawan, a staffer of Bangkok Phuket Hospital, said that 24 of the 32 passengers hospitalized there were foreigners and included Britons, Germans, Iranians, Israelis and at least one Australian, Irish and Canadian passenger. The remaining injured foreigners were at Phuket International Hospital.
An Irish survivor, identified as Sean, told of being badly burned on his arms, legs and back as he escaped the flames. Speaking to TITV from a local hospital, he said he knew something was wrong before the flight landed.
“You could tell when it was landing it was in trouble,” he said. “It was making a noise, this bang.”
One-Two-Go is one of several budget airlines started up in the past few years after Thailand’s airline sector was liberalized. It started operations in December 2003, and is the domestic subsidiary of Orient-Thai Airlines, a low-cost regional carrier based in Thailand.
The crash is the latest to hit the booming budget airline industry in Asia, which has been seen its rapid growth sometimes overshadowed a serious of accidents in the recent years.
An Adam Air flight plunged into off the Indonesian coast on New Year’s Day, killing 102 people. In 2004, a MD-82 operated by Indonesian budget carrier Lion Air skidded off the runaway in heavy rain at Solo airport in Central Java and crashed, killing 26 people