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 The DC-9 crashed Tuesday after failing to lift off in the eastern town of Goma, ramming through an airport fence. An airline official said most of those on board the plane had survived.
Transport Minister Charles Mwando Nsimba warned that the death toll could rise.
"We have to take into account the fact that there are bodies still trapped under the rubble," he said, noting that only two of the bodies so far were of passengers.
The remains of the cockpit and tail rose over the flattened fuselage, reduced to a charred and flattened mixture of smoking debris, ripped clothes, and destroyed wooden and cement shops.
American Marybeth Mosier, a Christian missionary who works in neighboring Tanzania, was on the plane with her two children. Her 14-year-old daughter climbed through a crack, pushed through by a passenger, she said. Her 3-year-old son broke his leg.
Others weren't so lucky, said the 51-year-old native of Dodge Center, Minn.
"As we were rushing down the aisle, smoke was coming up through the floor. A man was trapped under the seats and he was burning," Mosier said at Goma's Heal Africa hospital.
She said she tried to pull him up. "But there were so many people pushing ... I thought this man was so badly hurt and I couldn't block the way. I climbed over the tops of the seats" to escape.
Crew members and U.N. troops managed to evacuate most of the 79 passengers before the plane caught fire, said Dirk Cramers, a spokesman for the private Congolese company Hewa Bora Airways.
A total of 50 passengers who had survived the crash already have identified themselves to authorities, said Julien Mpaluku, the governor of the district.
On Wednesday, five more bodies had been recovered, bringing the death toll to at least 38, he said.
He also said both of the plane's black boxes have been recovered and that technicians were on their way to try to decode the information.
The Red Cross said 113 people had been injured and were being treated in local hospitals and clinics.
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 Congo, which is struggling to emerge from a 1998-2002 civil war, has experienced more fatal crashes since 1945 than any other African country, according to the nonprofit Aviation Safety Network.
Last week, the European Union added Hewa Bora to its list of airlines banned from flying in the EU, and Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Alison Duquette said no Congolese airlines now fly into the U.S. although they are not banned from doing so.
The aid agency World Vision, which has an office about a half-mile from the crash site, said the plane "failed to leave the ground," plowing "through wooden houses and shops in the highly populated Birere market."
A former pilot, Dunia Sindani, who was among the passengers told a local radio station that the plane suffered a problem in one wheel
-- possibly a flat tire -- and did not have enough power to lift off.
One of the plane's pilots reported that an engine died as the plane taxied down the runway, Mpaluku said. When the pilots tried to brake, a tire failed as well, the governor said.
It was unclear if weather played a part in the crash. It had stopped raining about one hour before the DC-9 took off at about 3 p.m., residents said.
Goma's runway was partially blocked and effectively shortened by lava from a 2001 volcanic eruption. The plane appeared to have burst through a fence separating the runway from a market district of wooden houses and cement shops where sugar, avocado, flour and fuel are sold.
The jetliner had been headed to the central city of Kisangani and then to the capital, Kinshasa, 700 miles to the west.
[Associated
Press; By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY]
Associated Press writers Eddy Isango in Kinshasa, Congo, and Robert Wielaard in Brussels, Belgium, contributed to this report.
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