Victims Are Incinerated in Passenger Jet Crash Horror

By ELIZABETH NASH

AT least 153 people have died after a plane bound for the holiday island of Gran Canaria crashed on take-off, shot off the runway and burst into flames at Madrid airport in one of the worst air disasters in recent times.

Barely two dozen passengers were reported to have survived, as Spanish emergency services at Barajas airport found themselves retrieving charred corpses rather than rescuing the living.

“They are pulling out burnt corpses. The plane has been completely destroyed,” an emergency services worker told Reuters.

A police officer said the bodies were so hot that police could barely touch them and told El Pais newspaper that the shattered wreckage bore no resemblance to a plane. Only 28 people survived the crash, according to an emergency services spokesman Herbigio Corral.

“It is miraculous that there were survivors,” an eyewitness told the El Mundo newspaper.

The Spanair flight from Madrid to Las Palmas reportedly developed engine trouble, with the left engine catching fire shortly after take-off.

The crash at Terminal 2 at 2.30pm sent columns of black smoke billowing across the Spanish capital.

The causes of the crash remained unclear, but rival theories about what had caused the crash as Spanair Flight JK5022 attempted to take off were already emerging.

One Spanish newspaper suggested that the plane, an MD-82, aborted its first take-off attempt and had undergone a safety check before trying again. Some witnesses reported seeing the left engine ablaze as the plane attempted a second take-off.

Spanair is a subsidiary of the Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) airline, and the scheduled flight JK5022 shared a code with the German carrier Lufthansa on flight LH255. Passengers from Denmark and Sweden were among those on board. SAS has been struggling with high fuel prices and tough competition during an economic slowdown. It has announced it was laying off 1,062 staff and cutting routes to turn the airline around after losing $81m in the first half of the year. Just hours before the crash, Spanair’s pilots had threatened to strike.

An airline spokesman said the plane was 14 years old and had passed all its annual checks, but declined to speculate on the likely cause of the failure.

The MD-82 is a medium-range single-aisle plane popular with regional airlines. It is a member of the MD-80 family of planes made by Boeing.

David Learmount, an aviation expert, said: “Like other major models such as the Boeing 373 jet, the MD-80 series has a long pedigree which dates back to the 1970s. It has a safety record very similar to other big-aisle planes of its kind. Spanair, the company involved, has a good safety record. It was involved in one incident in 2001 in Liverpool, when its undercarriage was damaged on landing. But on that occasion, no one was hurt.”

The rescue operation mounted in Madrid last night was on a scale comparable to that following the train bombings in March 2004.

To compound similarities with that tragedy, the dead bodies were taken to the same exhibition centre near the airport that was established as a provisional mortuary.

A total of 172 passengers and crew were on board. Emergency services set up a field hospital at the scene, with helicopters, ambulances, mobile intensive care units and rapid intervention vehicles snaking to and from the scene, transferring the dying and the wounded to six hospitals.

Psychologists and social workers were sent to a special crisis room at Terminal 4 to comfort survivors and passengers’ families, provide them with food and drink and arrange lodgings.

“Often it’s a question of accompanying people in shock and helping them through the next stage of their trauma, and managing practical details,” said one psychologist.

The plane ended up near Terminal 4, although it took off from Terminal 2.

Eight of the most seriously wounded were taken to a special burns unit at La Paz Hospital north of Madrid. The Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero cut short his holiday in Andalucia to visit the scene.

The tragedy had a knock-on effect on Madrid-bound flights throughout Spain, creating airport chaos nationwide at the peak of the holiday season.

The crash was the deadliest in the world since last year when a TAM Airlines jet crashed on landing at Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo. A total of 199 people were killed – all 186 on board and 13 on the ground.

Yesterday’s disaster was the first major air crash in western Europe since 8 October 2001 when an SAS airliner collided with a small plane at Milan’s Linate airport killing 118 people. Spain’s worst air disaster occurred in March 1977 at Tenerife airport when two planes crashed causing 585 deaths.

Spain’s Public Works Minister Magdalena Alvarez said it was “a great, horrible tragedy”.

The Spanish government has declared three days of mourning.

(c) 2008 Belfast Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.