Chartered airplane crashes in Venezuela
CARACAS: A plane carrying vacationers home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique crashed yesterday in western Venezuela after reporting engine problems. All 160 persons on board died, officials said. The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 was headed from Panama to Martinique when its pilot requested permission to make an emergency landing just after 3 am, saying there was trouble with both engines, said Col Francisco Paz, president of the National Civil Aviation Institute. Airport authorities lost radio contact with the West Caribbean Airways plane roughly ten minutes later in the remote area of Machiques, near the border with Colombia some 400 miles (650 kilometres) west of Caracas, he said. "The plane went out of control and crashed," Paz said. "There are no survivors." Rescue teams pulled dozens of bodies from the wreckage, which was strewn across a forested area among farms near Venezuela’s border with Colombia. The French civil aviation authority said all of the passengers were French citizens from Martinique, and confirmed that all died in the crash. About 150 distraught friends and relatives, many crying, gathered in Martinique outside the city hall of Ducos, a town of 20,000 people where about 30 of the victims reportedly lived. "The airplane should have landed early this morning. I heard on the radio it had crashed," said Claire Renette, 40, whose sister was among the victims. "I don’t understand. It’s as though the sky fell on my head today." Town officials called in doctors and psychologists. Officials in Martinique said the vacationers included civil servants and their families who had chartered the flight for a one-week trip to Panama. "There were couples who went away, and so today there are children who are orphans," Andre Charpentier, mayor of the Martinique town of Basse-Pointe from which 16 of the victims came, said on France’s I-Tele. French President Jacques Chirac expressed his "strong emotion" as he learned of the "appalling catastrophe" and offered condolences to victims’ families. The airline, in a statement from Colombia, said 152 passengers, including an infant, and eight Colombian crew members were aboard the MD-82, made by McDonnell Douglas. Venezuelan officials confirmed there were 160 aboard, including eight crew members. The airline said the pilot reported an emergency 20 miles (30 kilometres) from the Colombia-Venezuela border. Authorities said the plane requested permission to attempt an emergency landing at the nearby airport in Maracaibo, Venezuela, but never made it. It went down in a wooded area between two farms in the western state of Zulia, said German Bracho, the state’s civil protection director. The plane went down just east of the Sierra de Perija mountain range, which runs along the border with Colombia. Hundreds of rescue workers were searching through the wreckage and had found one of the plane’s black boxes, which could provide clues about the crash, said Air Force Major Javier Perez, the search and rescue chief. He said the cockpit voice recorder had yet to be found. The crash came only two days after a Cypriot airliner plunged into the mountains north of Athens, Greece, killing all 121 people aboard. The plane had been chartered by a Martinique travel agency. It had departed from Panama carrying enough fuel for the three-hour trip to Martinique, Panama’s civil aviation agency said in a statement. Crashed plane previously dropped tail cone in flight John Ospina, spokesman for the Medellin-based airline, told The Associated Press that the tail cone incident involving the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 plane happened in early July while the plane was headed to an airport in Colombia’s coffee-growing region. Ospina said the plane landed safely on that flight to Pereira, adding that the pilots weren’t even aware they had lost the tail cone until after they landed. Ospina said the same plane also underwent several hours of repairs while passengers waited to board a domestic flight about two weeks ago. He said he did not know the nature of that problem. The plane passed all safety inspections Monday night in Colombia before heading to Panama to begin yesterday’s ill-fated flight, Ospina said. The pilot reported engine problems before went down in Venezuela early Tuesday on the flight from Panama to Martinique.
BOGOTA, Colombia: A spokesman for West Caribbean Airways said yesterday that the plane that crashed in Venezuela, killing all 160 people aboard, had its tail cone drop off last month during a flight but was later repaired.
Comments
"Chartered airplane crashes in Venezuela"