The aircraft, carrying 79 passengers on Congo's Hewa Bora Airways, plummeted into the densely packed Goma neighborhood as it struggled to take off, witnesses reported.

More than a hundred people were injured and at least 30 killed, according to the latest estimates.

"When I arrived, there were somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people who had surrounded the wreckage, many of whom were trying to determine who had been killed and who had survived," Davie said by telephone.

"[People] were trying to put out the flames, trying to prevent the fire from the fuselage from spreading into the market area surrounding the wreckage."

A man wearing a makeshift mask approaches the flaming tail section of a DC-9 aircraft that crashed during takeoff in Goma

"One of the tragic, and also touching, sights I saw was dozens of Congolese women filling up plastic buckets of water from taps nearby and running with them to lines of men, who had formed a kind of human chain into the wreckage,"