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Spanish airplane disaster kills 153, but 19 survive

As Spain mourned its worst air disaster in nearly 25 years, investigators pressed yesterday to discover what caused a Spanish airliner to crash on takeoff from Madrid, killing 153 people in an intense, shocking fireball.

Only 19 people survived Wednesday’s crash of a Spanair plane bound for the Canary Islands.

Spain has declared three days of mourning. Flags in Madrid flew at half-staff and a silent vigil was planned for noon.

The king and queen plan to visit a makeshift morgue where relatives are waiting to claim the remains of their loved ones.

Spanair says it does not know the cause of the crash. It says the pilot of the US-built MD-82 airliner initially reported a problem with a gauge that measures temperature outside the plane.

This delayed the takeoff while the problem was repaired, and then the plane crashed at the end of the runway during the second takeoff attempt, burning and largely disintegrating.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais said one of the two engines failed and may have caught fire during takeoff.

Spanair has had other recent engine problems. The company confirmed yesterday that an MD-82 was forced to make an emergency landing on Saturday on a flight from Lanzarote in the Canary Islands to Madrid because of problems with both of its engines.

The plane landed on the nearby island of Gran Canaria, the destination of Wednesday’s flight.

A company official speaking on condition of anonymity said he did not know if the same plane was involved in both cases. After the crash, the company now has eight MD82s.

The morgue has been set up at Madrid’s main convention center — the same facility used for relatives to identify bodies after the March 11, 2004, Islamic terror attacks that killed 191 people on Madrid trains.

Development Minister Magdalena Alvarez said yesterday that 14 bodies have been identified so far. She said the process could take several days because many bodies were burned beyond recognition and forensic teams are using DNA techniques.

Spanair chartered a plane in the Canary Islands to fly in relatives of people killed in the crash.
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