Khartoum airport's head of medical services, Major-General Mohamed Osman Mahjoub, said authorities had so far established there were 123 survivors but 66 people were unaccounted for. The plane's emergency chutes enabled the survivors to escape.
Twenty-eight bodies had been taken to a nearby mortuary, said Mahjoub, adding that some of the 66 people unaccounted for might have survived and left the airport during the confusion after the plane fire broke out on Tuesday night.
The nationalities of the dead were not immediately known.
The Sudan Airways plane, identified by Sudanese television only as an Airbus without any model details, was carrying 203 passengers and 14 crew on a flight from Jordan's capital Amman.
A dust storm and heavy rain had hit the airport on Tuesday, officials said.
Sudan's Minister of State for Transport, Mabrouk Mubarak Salim, said there was an explosion in the airliner's right wing engine area. "So far we don't have precise information but we think the weather is a main reason for what happened," he said.
Sudanese television showed emergency workers using hoses to spray water on the burning fuselage of the airliner.
"The operation to recover bodies from the plane is going on now," police deputy director general Al Adel Ajeb said in a television interview. "It is a difficult operation because some bodies are completely burned and there are body parts."
"BAD WEATHER"
One passenger said the plane had tried to land at Khartoum airport "but then the captain told us we couldn't land because of bad weather".
