A chartered airliner carrying vacationing French passengers home to Martinique crashed in a mountainous part of northern Venezuela early Tuesday morning after its engines failed, killing all 160 people aboard, the aviation authorities here said.
The two-engine plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82 operated by West Caribbean Airways of Colombia, was traveling from Panama to Martinique when the pilots reported engine problems to Venezuelan air traffic controllers at 3:07 a.m. Minutes later, the controllers lost radio contact.
The plane crashed in a field along the eastern edge of the Sierra de Perija mountain range just inside Venezuela’s rugged northwestern border with Colombia, about 90 miles southwest of the city of Maracaibo, said the Venezuelan interior minister, Jesse Chacón.
“They had problems with one engine and then with another engine, and at that moment it went down,” Mr. Chacón said.
West Caribbean Flight 708 first reported difficulties to controllers at Maiquetía Simón Bolívar International Airport outside Caracas, said Francisco Paz, president of Venezuela’s National Civil Aviation Institute.
“They asked what kind of problems they were having, and the pilots indicated that it was a technical problem in the engines,” Mr. Paz told Unión Radio in Caracas. “Ten minutes after this communication with the tower the signal was lost.”
Delfín García, an official with the Aviation Institute who was in Maiquetía’s control tower on Tuesday morning, said the pilots had first reported problems in one engine and asked controllers for permission to drop to 31,000 feet.
At 3:15 a.m., with a second engine failing, they asked for permission to go down to 14,000 feet and to land in La Chinita International Airport in Maracaibo, he said in a phone interview. “At that moment, communications broke off,” he said.
The aircraft, meanwhile, was dropping fast. “It started to fall at a speed of 7,000 feet a minute,” said Mr. Chacón, the interior minister. Venezuelan officials estimated that the plane crashed minutes later.
Farmers near the Perija range reported seeing fire and, once the plane hit the ground, an explosion. Venezuelan news television later showed images of firemen and rescue workers removing debris and searching for bodies in the shattered fuselage
“It was at 3 a.m., and the plane was coming in with fire coming off the right side,” a farmer, Yoel González, told Globovisión television. “Then it passed the Porvenir farm, and then we heard an explosion.”
The mayor of the nearby town of Machiques, Alfonso Márquez, was among the first at the scene. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told reporters. “I just don’t have words for it. There were bodies spread out all over.”
A jetliner like the MD-82 can glide, if its engines fail, said John Jackson, a former executive at Pan Am and Braniff Airlines who is now a vice president at the Miami-based AV Group, an aviation consultant. But he said bad weather conditions, or the kind of downdrafts common in mountainous regions, could bring a plane down fast.
“If you have strong winds, you can just drop like a rock,” Mr. Jackson said by telephone from his office. “Once that nose goes down, if you can’t keep it on the glide path, you’re in trouble.”
A spokeswoman at the French Embassy in Caracas, Felipa Lozano, said most of the 152 passengers were French. After a week’s vacation in Panama, they were making their way home to Martinique, one of four overseas departments administered by France. The eight crew members, among them Capt. Omar Ospina and the co-pilot, David Muñoz, were Colombian.
In Paris, President Jacques Chirac said he was “deeply saddened” by the crash and offered his condolences. The French government opened a crisis center for relatives of the victims and ordered the minister in charge of French territories, François Baroin, to Martinique.
Search-and-rescue teams rushed to the scene and set up a field hospital in the hope of treating survivors. But it quickly became clear that no one had survived. By late morning Venezuelan military helicopters were instead ferrying bodies to a morgue in Maracaibo.
The authorities reported finding a flight recorder. They said it was too early to pinpoint what had caused the two engines to falter. There was no answer on Tuesday at the airline’s offices in Medellín, where it is based, or in Bogotá.
West Caribbean, a seven-year-old airline that mainly serves northern Colombia and the Caribbean, has had troubles before. In March, a twin-engine propeller-driven plane operated by the airline crashed during takeoff from the small Colombian island of Providencia, killing six passengers and the two pilots. The cause has yet to be determined.
Three months before, the airline was forced to pay a $46,000 fine after an annual audit by Colombia’s civil aviation authority found 14 violations of airline regulations, from lack of training for pilots to poorly kept records, Carlos Eduardo Montealegre, the director of the aviation authority, said in an interview.
In May, the authorities began a close supervision of the airline’s finances because West Caribbean had posted $6 million in losses in 2004, said Colombia’s port and transportation authority.
“After the financial problems and the accident in March,” Mr. Montealegre said, “we initiated a stricter oversight of the company to make sure that it complied with 100 percent of the requirements.”
Mr. Montealegre, however, said the airline had fulfilled its commitments. He also said the MD-82 that crashed was examined Monday night in Río Negro airport in Medellín and had shown no signs of mechanical problems.
(Source http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/international/americas/17venezuela.html?_r=1&ref=martinique)
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