Chartered plane with 12 crashes in Papua New Guinea

A chartered plane with 12 people on board, piloted by an Australian, crashed into a swamp, 1 km short of the airport, in Papua New Guinea following engine trouble on Wednesday aternoon. The plane crash victims included a mother and her three children. The Pilot was Benjamin Picard, aged 31, of Sydney. It was a Britten Norman-Islander plane of the Sunbird aviation. It crashed nose first into the swamp next to the airstrip. The plane was flying from Oxamin to Kiyunga, where it crashed. Apart from the pilot, there was another Australian on board. Papua New Guinea is an island north of Australia and borders Indonesia's Jayapura. It was in the 1800s that the Europeans began to arrive in Papua, named by Portuguese explorer. the Germans took the northern half and the British the southern half of the island. In 1905, the Australians seized the island and appropriated the German half during the World War 1.