Three days of official mourning have been declared in Madrid following the deaths of 153 people when a Spanair plane crashed on take-off at Madrid’s Barajas airport.
Nineteen people survived the crash, although some are in a critical condition.
Spanair flight JK 5022, bound for Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, took off on Wednesday lunchtime with 172 people on board.
Initial reports suggest that a fire had broken out in one of the MD82 plane’s engines during or shortly after take-off from Terminal Four, and the plane skidded off the runway and ended up in a field.
Spanish Transport Minister Magdalena Alvarez said the plane had earlier begun taxiing to the runway but had turned back because of a technical problem and this had caused an hour’s delay in the take-off. Some reports say that the pilot had reported a fault with a temperature gauge, but it was thought to have been fixed
Both the flight data and voice recorders have been recovered from the wreckage and investigators will analyse these to try and ascertain exactly what went so tragically wrong.
According to Spanair, owned by Scandinavian company SAS, the 15 year old plane had passed a safety examination in January of this year.
It is the deadliest air accident in Spain since a Colombian airline’s Boeing 747 crashed in Madrid in 1983 killing 181 people.