Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Related: Raw Video Of Crash

UPDATE:

MADRID, Spain (AP) - A Spanish airliner bound for the Canary Islands crashed, burned and broke into pieces Wednesday while trying to take off from Madrid’s Barajas airport, killing 149 people on board, officials said.

There were only 26 survivors in the mid-afternoon crash, a Spanish emergency official said.

A police officer said the bodies were so hot that police could barely touch them and told El Pais newspaper the shattered wreckage bore no resemblance to a plane.

Dozens of ambulances rushed to the site as columns of smoke billowed from the wreckage. The prime minister broke off his vacation in southern Spain and rushed back to Madrid, heading straight for the airport.

“I have never seen anything like this in my life,” ambulance driver Luis Ferreras was quoted as saying by El Pais.

A Spanish emergency rescue official said only 26 people survived the crash and the rest of those aboard were given up for dead. The official with the SAMUR municipal rescue service gave the toll after touring the site of the crash. He spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because of department rules that barred him from giving his name.

Spanair Flight JK5022—bound for the popular Canary Islands off the West African coast during the height of Europe’s summer vacation season—sped off the end of the runway, crashed and broke into pieces, reports said.

Spanair spokesman Sergio Allard told a news conference the plane was carrying 175 people and the cause of the crash was not immmediately known.

El Pais said the plane’s takeoff had been an hour late due to technical problems. It eventually managed to get slightly off the ground but crashed near the end of the runway, El Pais said, quoting an employee of the national airport authority AENA.

Helicopters and fire trucks dumped water on the plane, which ended up in a wooded area at the end of the runway at Terminal 4.

A makeshift morgue was set up at the city’s main convention center, officials said.

The plane was an Boeing MD-82 on a codeshare flight to Las Palmas with Lufthansa’s LH255, Spanair said. Departures from Madrid’s airport were suspended for several hours but later resumed.

Boeing spokesman Jim Proulx said the company would send at least one person to assist in the investigation of the crash as soon as it receives an invitation from Spanish authorities.

The Guardian:

Nearly 150 people are feared dead after a plane overshot the runway at Madrid’s Barajas airport, according to Spanish media reports.

Only 25 people survived when Spanair flight JK 5022, which had 173 people on board, crashed after swerving off the runway at the airport’s terminal four, according to the Reuters news agency.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo reported that at least 100 people had been killed, while Spanish government sources said 45 people had so far been confirmed dead, with another 19 people seriously injured.

Times Of London:

The airport was immediately closed as firefighters aboard 11 engines tried to tackle a blaze on the plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82. Forty-five ambulances were sent to the scene.

Initial reports suggested that an engine on the left hand side of the aircraft caught fire as the plane headed down the runway, impeding its take-off and sending it careening off onto a grassy area near the terminal building. The smoke could be seen several kilometres away.

El Pais reported that the aircraft had already attempted one take-off but had had unspecified difficulties. Another newspaper, La Vanguardia, said that the pilot had been unable to lift the plane’s nose.

Flight JKK 5022 was on a codeshare with Lufthansa flight LH 255, which prompted speculation that some of the passengers may have been Germans.

Relatives of those aboard the plane soon began arriving at the airport, where a spokesman said that a room had been set aside for them and pyschological counselling was on offer.

Eight injured passengers were taken to the La Paz hospital and a further eight to the Ramon y Cajal. Other Madrid hospitals were told to free up facilities - although it was unclear whether they would be needed given the heavy death toll.

In the last ten years, 42 people have been killed in plane accidents in Spain. Today’s crash might prove even more deadly than one in Bilbao in February 1985, in which 148 people were killed.

The worst plane crash in Spain’s history was on March 27, 1977, when two planes collided at Los Rodeos airport in Tenerife, killing 585 people.

Spanair is a subsidiary of the Scandinavian airline SAS, which said in a statement: “Spanair is doing everything possible to assist the Spanish authorities at this difficult time. Spanair will provide further information as soon as it becomes available.”

The crash came just hours after pilots at the airline threatened to strike over SAS’s cost-cutting plans at the struggling Majorca-based airline, which has been making heavy losses.