A Let Aircraft Industries L-410UVP operated by Tracep Congo Aviation crashed near the town of Kenge on 25 September, and Congolese investigation authority BPEA reports no survivors.

The aircraft, registered 9S-GUC, came down in Kenge, roughly 200km east of Kinshasa. "There are reportedly no survivors and the aircraft is completely burnt out," the authority states.

BPEA identifies the operator as Tracep Congo Aviation, a carrier based in Goma. The airline figures on the European Union's blacklist of carriers, under the blanket prohibition covering all operators from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The authority has dispatched investigators to the scene and is seeking a passenger manifest from the operator. It has also requested assistance from civil and military authorities to preserve the accident site — a measure that points to concerns over evidence integrity at crash locations in the region.

Congolese newspaper Le Potentiel reports the aircraft was returning to Kinshasa from Kikwit, carrying several senior government figures among its occupants, including the auditor general of the armed forces. Kenge lies roughly halfway along the intended route.

The crash marks the third occurrence BPEA is now investigating this month. The first two — one involving a Douglas DC-8 and the other a Boeing 737-300 — occurred earlier in September and resulted in no injuries. The pace has stretched the authority's resources: it states it has "had to scramble" to dispatch a safety investigator to the site of the Kenge accident.

No information on the number of occupants, the flight's departure time, or the circumstances of the crash has yet been released. The post-impact fire that destroyed the airframe will complicate the on-scene examination, and the outcome of the investigation will depend heavily on the preservation of the site and the recovery of any flight-recorder material the L-410 carried.

With three separate inquiries running simultaneously and limited investigative capacity, BPEA faces a test of whether it can complete credible investigations into all three occurrences — and whether the Kenge crash prompts any wider scrutiny of Congolese operators, which remain excluded from European airspace under the EU's blanket ban.