Up to 150 tourists dead as plane is ripped apart in runway fireball

Almost 150 people were feared dead last night after a tourist plane crashed 'in a scene from Hell' and burst into flames at Madrid airport.

The Spanair jet with 164 passengers and nine crew on board split in two as it smashed back on to the runway just seconds after lifting off.

There were reports of an explosion and a fire breaking out in an engine. The plane, an MD-82, had earlier been delayed from take-off for an hour for checks on a reported mechanical fault.

An unconfirmed report said the crash happened on the pilot's second attempt at a take-off.

There were several children on board, including two babies. It was not immediately known if the babies were among the dead.

Around 27 survivors were pulled alive from the wreckage and 23 of them were taken to hospital with serious injuries.

At least one is thought to have died on the way to hospital.

Spain's Interior Ministry confirmed late last night that at least 45 people had died, but Spanish media said the true figure was likely to be about 150.

Civil Guard officer Guillermo Altares said: 'There is nothing left resembling a plane. It is horrific. It is totally burned.'

Another rescue worker said: 'It's the closest thing to a scene from Hell that you'll ever see. There was almost nothing left of the plane.'


Herbigio Corral, who headed the rescue effort, told reporters: 'Only the tail was recognisable, there was wreckage scattered all over the place and dead bodies
across a wide area. A lot of them were children.'

The flight packed with holidaymakers was heading from the Spanish capital's main Barajas airport to Las Palmas in Gran Canaria.

The British Embassy in Madrid last night sent staff to Barajas airport - Europe's fourth busiest, carrying more than 50million passengers last year - to try to establish if any Britons were involved in the crash.

Some 17million British holidaymakers visit Spain every year and more than a million British expats are thought to live in the country.

Seven German holidaymakers were said to have been on board, while a Canary Islands official said passengers also included Swedes and Dutch.

Spanair's head of press Adolfo Lazaro said: 'The flight crashed on take-off at 14.45pm [13.45 UK time].

'We will not be providing passenger names or details until the families of all passengers on board have been contacted. We will not speculate on the cause of the crash.'

The plane took off more than an hour late from the airport's Terminal 2 after suffering technical difficulties, it was reported.

Witnesses said the left engine burst into flames at the moment the aircraft left the ground - known as 'the point of no return.'

The jet skidded off the runway near Terminal 4, crashed, split in two and burst into flames.

Fire spread to grassy areas around the runway and columns of thick black smoke poured from the wreckage.

Some 170 police, and 230 paramedics raced to the scene. Seventy firemen using 11 fire engines took two hours to put out the blaze.

They had difficulty entering the charred wreckage because of the temperature inside, and helicopters had to be called in to dump water on to the plane.

Last night Spain's prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero interrupted his holidays to go to the scene and the Spanish flag is to fly at half mast in the Olympic village in Beijing.





While the cause of the crash was last night unclear, aviation experts say that even where an engine fails during take-off, today's sophisticated aircraft are designed in such a way that they can still land safely.

When both engines failed on a British Airways Boeing 777 approaching Heathrow airport earlier this year, pilots were able to perform an emergency landing with only minor injuries.

In the case of Spanair flight JK5022, this points to an engine fire which could have caused shrapnel to erupt into the fuselage, fatally damaging aviation systems.

The accident comes as Majorca-based Spanair - a subsidiary of Scandinavian Airlines Systems - suffers one of the most difficult years in its 22-year history, with pilots threatening to strike over swingeing job cuts just hours before the crash.
Factfile

* The MD-82 is a medium range, single-aisle plane that has mostly been phased out in Europe because its high fuel use makes it expensive
* The 15-year-old Boeing-manufactured plane in the crash yesterday was one of 15 owned by Spanair and has a capacity of 172 passengers and crew
* The crash was the first in Madrid since 1983, when two airliners collided on the runway in heavy fog
* The MD-80 series, which includes the MD-82, came into operation in 1979 and has been involved in at least ten fatal crashes, with an overall loss of 1,000 lives