Survivors say everything seemed normal as a jetliner with 131 people on board prepared to land in a storm on the Caribbean island resort San Andres. Suddenly it plunged to Earth, killing one person — a death toll so low San Andres Governor Pedro Gallardo called it a miracle.
“The pilot informed us that we were going to land in San Andres, we buckled our seat belts, we settled in — and a second later, boom! A big bang,” 25-year-old survivor Alvaro Granados said, who was flying with his wife and two children.
“When my wife and I stood and looked behind us we saw that the back of the plane was missing,” he said.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Authorities say it happened so quickly the pilot did not report an emergency to the control tower at Colombia’s San Andres Island.
Experts are trying to figure out why the Aires airline Boeing 737 jetliner hit the ground short of the runway on Monday — and how 130 of the people on board survived as the aircraft skidded on its belly with its fuselage fracturing and its landing gear and at least one engine ripping off.
After the jet ground to a stop, passengers scrambled from their seats or were helped to safety. Authorities said firefighters quickly doused flames that broke out on a wing.
The one fatality was Amar Fernandez de Barreto, 68, and doctors said she may have succumbed to a heart attack. Officials said 119 people in all were taken to hospitals or clinics, most of them for minor injuries.
Manuel Villamizar, director of the emergency operations center in Bogota, told reporters late on Monday that he had arranged for six of the badly injured to be flown in from San Andres island, where the crash occurred. The health ministry said a total of 13 injured were being moved to Bogota.
Colonel Donald Tascon, deputy director of Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, speculated the plane’s low altitude as it approached for a landing — perhaps 30m just before the crash — may have avoided more severe damage and saved lives.
“It was a miracle and we have to give thanks to God,” Gallardo said.
Granado said there was little turbulence when the plane went down.
Ricardo Ramirez, a civil engineer who was flying with his wife, told Caracol Radio everything seemed fine despite the rain and lightning.
“The plane was coming in perfectly. We were just about to land, everything was under control,” he said. The crash “appeared out of nowhere.”
Ramirez said he struggled to free himself and his wife from their seat belts.
“We tried to get out of the plane because the plane was starting to shoot flames,” he said. “In a few minutes, a police patrol arrived and helped us.”
Ramirez said his wife suffered a dislocated knee.
Officials were investigating a range of possible causes and looking into reports that Aires Flight 8520 was hit by lightning before the crash, Colombian Air Force Colonel David Barrero said.
“You can’t speculate. Lightning? A gust of wind? The investigation will say,” Barrero said by telephone from San Andres.
Aviation experts agreed it was too early to speculate.
“You don’t exclude any possibility, but investigators will be looking closely at the weather,” said William Voss, president and chief executive officer of the Flight Safety Foundation, based in Alexandria, Virginia.
Voss said a “sudden shift in wind direction can cause the aircraft to suddenly lose a lot of lift and end up landing short of the runway.”
Tascon said San Andres’ airport is not equipped with sophisticated equipment such as Doppler radar, which is used in many US airports to help detect wind shear.
Larry Cornman, a physicist who studies wind shear and turbulence at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said he doubted lightning alone would be enough to bring down an aircraft.
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