153 burn to death in plane fireball
Rescuer tells of Spanish air disaster hell
Published:
A PROBE was continuing today into Spain’s worst plan crash for 25 years, after 153 holiday-makers burned to death when their jet crashed on take-off.
The plane crash tragedy at Madrid’s Barajas International Airport turned a wooded area off the end of a runway into a hellish scene of charred bodies and smouldering wreckage
Only 19 people survived the Spanair MD-82 crash and some were in a critical condition. Twenty children and two babies were among the passengers on the plane.
The airline did not release a death toll or the nationalities of those on board, but said the plane carried 172 passengers and crew.
As smoke billowed from the wreckage, dozens of fire engines and ambulances rushed to help, lining a nearby road and filling a field next to a swath of charred vegetation. Helicopters flew overhead, dumping water on fires.
One rescue worker was reported to have said: “The plane was split in two and full of charred bodies.
“It’s the closest thing to Hell that I’ve seen. The bodies were boiling. They were just cooking. We burned ourselves just by touching them. It’s a miracle anybody survived.”
Rescuers rushed the few survivors to hospitals, while emergency workers shrouded the dead in white sheets. One body lay on burned grass, an arm and a leg poking out.
Later, a long convoy of black hearses rolled on to the airport grounds to carry bodies to a makeshift mortuary set up at Madrid’s main convention centre – the same facility used for relatives to identify bodies after the March 11 2004 Islamic terror attacks that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong. It’s believed the plane had barely become airborne when it veered right, crashed and broke into pieces.
Spanair, a Spanish company wholly owned by Scandinavian Airlines, said it did not know what caused the accident.
Spain’s development minister Magdalena Alvarez said investigators ruled out foul play and considered the crash an accident. She said the plane’s flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.
While preparing for a first take-off attempt, the plane’s pilot reported a breakdown in a gauge that measures temperature outside the plane.
The gauge was fixed, delaying the departure, said Spanair spokeswoman Susana Vergara.
It was on the second take-off attempt that the plane crashed.
Spanair Flight JK5022 originated in Barcelona and was heading for the city of Las Palmas. It was a code-share with Flight LH255 of the German carrier Lufthansa.
The accident was Spain’s worst air disaster since 1983, when a Boeing 747 operated by the Colombian airline Avianca crashed near Madrid on landing approach, killing 181 people. In 1985, an Iberia Boeing 727 crashed near Bilbao in the Basque region, killing 148 people.
The deadliest disaster in aviation history occurred in Spain in 1977. Two fully loaded Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands and a total of 583 people died.
Prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero broke off his holiday in southern Spain and rushed back to Madrid. He expressed his condolences to people who lost loved ones and later headed to the mortuary to comfort mourners.
Sergio Allard, a Spanair spokesman, said the crashed plane passed an inspection in January and no problems had been reported since then. The plane was 15 years old and had been owned by Spanair the past nine, he said.
The DC-9/MD-80 family of twin-engine, medium-range jets 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.
Spanair has a fleet of more than 60 aircraft and runs around 600 flights daily.
