A Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 jet with 135 passengers on board has crashed while attempting to land at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that at least one person has been killed and 20 injured. As many as 50 passengers were reported to have survived, according to one Turkish news agency.

Airport officials said that the aircraft came down on farmland while on its approach to runway 18Left 36Right, and broke into three parts.

Early photographs of the crash appeared to show the plane landed at a steep angle in a ploughed field a couple of hundred yards beyond a ditch at the airport perimeter.

The body of the jet appeared to have remained fairly intact, with fuselage breaking in two just in front of the wings. The cockpit appeared intact and the door was open.

Experts said that it was good news that no significant fire appeared to have broken out.

Air traffic around Schiphol, an extremely busy aviation centre which is one of Europe's main hub airports, has been frozen.

The 737-800 is a new aircraft, the re-engineered and redesigned next generation of the original 737 which has for several decades been renowned as the workhorse of the skies.

Schiphol has an excellent safety record. Turkish Airlines is said to operate a modern fleet of planes with well-trained staff, but its record is not unblemished.

In November 2007 a Turkish plane carrying 50 passengers and seven crew members crashed shortly before it was due to land, killing all those on board.

The Atlasjet plane took off from Istanbul, heading to Isparta, in south-west Turkey, but went off the radar just before landing at the airport. Pilot error was blamed for the crash

In August 2007, one of Atlasjet's planes was hijacked by two men who held several passengers hostage for four hours before surrendering.

In January 2003, a Turkish Airlines plane crashed while attempting to land on a fog-covered runway in the city of Diyarbakir, killing 75 people. Five people survived with injuries.