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150 thought dead in crash of jetliner at Madrid airport
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Published: August 21, 2008
MADRID, Spain
A jetliner heading to the popular Canary Islands vacation resort crashed during takeoff yesterday, turning a wooded area off the end of a runway into a hellish scene of charred bodies and smoldering wreckage. More than 150 were believed dead -- Spain's worst air disaster in nearly 25 years.
Only 19 people survived the midafternoon crash of the Spanair MD-82 at Madrid's Barajas International Airport, and some were in critical condition, said Development Minister Magdalena Alvarez, whose department oversees civil aviation in Spain. She initially reported 26 survivors.
The airline didn't release a death toll, but it said that the plane carried 172 passengers and crew members.
As smoke billowed from the wreckage, many firetrucks and ambulances rushed to help, lining a nearby road and filling a field next to a swath of charred vegetation. Helicopters flew over, dumping water on fires.
"The scene is devastating," said Pablo Albella, an emergency rescue worker. "The fuselage is destroyed. The plane burned. I have seen a kilometer of charred land and few whole pieces of the fuselage. It is all destruction."
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 onto the airport grounds to carry bodies to a makeshift morgue set up at Madrid's main convention center. Flight departures resumed after several hours.
It was not immediately clear what went wrong. Alvarez said that the jetliner had barely gotten airborne when it veered right, crashed and broke into pieces.
A spokesman for Spanair, a Spanish company wholly owned by Scandinavian Airlines, said it did not know what caused the accident. Alvarez, the government minister, said that investigators ruled out foul play and considered the crash an accident.
While preparing for a first takeoff attempt, the plane's pilot reported a breakdown in a gauge that measures the temperature outside the plane. The gauge was fixed, delaying the departure, said Spanair spokeswoman Susana Vergara.
It was on the second takeoff attempt that the plane crashed.
The Spanair spokesman, Sergio Allard, originally said that Flight JK5022 to Las Palmas had 175 passengers and crew members aboard, but the airline later put the number at 172. The flight, which originated in Barcelona, was a code-share with Flight LH255 of the German carrier Lufthansa.
Allard declined to give any numbers on the nationalities of those on board, saying that relatives had to be notified first.
In Germany, Lufthansa said it issued tickets to seven people who checked in for the flight, and four of those were from Germany. It was unclear whether they were German citizens.
Sweden's Foreign Ministry said that two Swedes were on the plane. It said that one was at a hospital but the other was unaccounted for.
The accident was Spain's worst air disaster since 1983, when a Boeing 747 run 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.
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.
After being told about yesterday's crash, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero broke off his vacation in southern Spain and rushed back to Madrid, heading straight for the airport.
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II sent condolences to King Juan Carlos of Spain. In an expression of mourning, a soccer match in Copenhagen between the national teams of Denmark and Spain started with a minute of silence, and players on both teams wore black armbands.
Allard, the Spanair spokesman, said that the crashed plane passed an inspection in January and no problems had been reported since then. The plane was 15 years old, and Spanair has owned it for 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 were killed.
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