MADRID: A Spanish airliner bound for the Canary Islands at the height of the vacation season crashed, burned and broke into pieces yesterday while trying to take off from Madrid, killing 149 people on board, officials said. There were only 26 survivors in the mid-afternoon crash, said Spanish Development Minister Magdalena Alvarez, whose department is in charge of civil aviation. It was Spain's most deadly air disaster in more than 20 years. A police officer said the bodies were so hot that police could b arely touch them and told El Pais newspaper the shattered wreckage bore no resemblance to a plane.
Only the tail was recognisable, there was wreckage scattered all over the place and dead bodies across a wide area. A lot of them were children," Herbigio Corral, who headed the rescue effort, told reporters. Police escorted tearful relatives of passengers past reporters and dozens of workers identified as psychologists and social workers arrived at the terminal. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero interrupted his holidays in southern Spain and the Spanish Olympic Committee said the Spanis h flag would fly at half mast in the Olympic village in Beijing. Spain's national football team wore black armbands at a friendly match with Denmark.
Dozens of ambulances rushed to the site as columns of smoke billowed from the wreckage. "I have never seen anything like this in my life," ambulance driver Luis Ferreras, who viewed the crash site, was quoted as saying by El Pais. Spanair Flight JK5022 - bound for Las Palmas during the height of Europe's summer holiday season - was just barely airborne when it veered right, crashed and broke into pieces, reports said. Spanair spokesman Sergio Allard told a news conference the plane was carrying 175 people and the cause of the crash was not immediately known.
Spanair declined to give nationalities of those on board saying next of kin had to be notified first, or to give a death toll. In Germany, Lufthansa said it issued tickets to seven people who checked in for the flight, and that four of those were from Germany. It was unclear whether they were German citizens. El Pais said the plane's takeoff had been an hour late because of technical problems. It eventually managed to get slightly off the ground but crashed near the end of the runway, El Pais said, quoting an employee of the national airport authority AENA. Helicopters and fire trucks dumped water on the plane, which ended up in a wooded area at the end of the runway at Terminal 4. A makeshift morgue was set up at the city's main convention center, officials said.
The plane was an MD-82 on a codeshare flight with Lufthansa's LH255, Spanair said. Departures from Madrid's airport were suspended for several hours but later resumed. McDonnell Douglas was bought out by Boeing in 1997. Boeing spokesman Jim Proulx said the company would send at least one person to assist in the investigation of the crash as soon as it receives an invitation from Spanish authorities. "We stand ready to provide technical assistance," he said, reading from a prepared statement.
Allard said the plane last passed an inspection in January of this year and no problems with it had been reported since then. The plane is 15 years old and has been owned by Spanair for the past nine, he said. The DC-9/MD-80 family of twin-engine medium-range airliners enjoyed wide popularity among the world's airlines in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. But it has had a number of fatal accidents, the deadliest of which was a crash of Slovenia's Adria Airways flight in Corsica in 1981, when all 180 people on board perished.
In Copenhagen, Mats Jansson, the chief executive of Spanair's owner, Scandinavian Airlines, said he had no information about the toll or the accident itself. Jansson and SAS deputy CEO John Dueholm were on their way home from Beijing when they heard about the accident and immediately decided to fly to Madrid with a team of crisis counselors. "We want to be on location ... there are many questions," Jansson told a brief news conference.
Spanair, which is 100-percent owned by SAS, has a fleet of more than 60 aircraft and offers around 600 flights daily. This kind of incident is known in the industry as a "runway excursion" and is one of the most common in airline operations. The vast majority end without injury or damage, but in recent years there have been a number of very serious accidents.
Last July, 199 people were killed in Brazil's worst air disaster when an Airbus A320 belonging to TAM airlines skidded off the runway at Sao Paolo's Congonhas airport before crashing into a nearby gas station and an air cargo building. Five people died and 65 were injured on May 30 when the A320 belonging to Grupo Taca skidded off the end of the runway at Toncontin International Airport near the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa.
The deadliest disaster in aviation history occurred in Spain in 1977 as a result of a runway collision between two fully loaded Boeing 747s in the Canary Islands. A total of 583 people died. In November 1983, a Boeing 747 operated by the Colombian airline Avianca crashed near Madrid as it prepared to land, killing 181 people. In February 1985, an Iberia Boeing 727 crashed near Bilbao in the Basque region, killing 148 people. - AP
