CARACAS, Venezuela, 17 August 2005 — A plane carrying vacationers home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique crashed yesterday in western Venezuela after reporting engine problems, killing all 160 people on board, officials said.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-82 was headed from Panama to Martinique when its pilot requested permission to make an emergency landing just after 3 a.m. (0700 GMT), saying there was trouble with both engines, said Col. Francisco Paz, president of the National Civil Aviation Institute.
Airport authorities lost radio contact with the West Caribbean Airways plane roughly 10 minutes later in the remote area of Machiques, near the border with Colombia some 400 miles (650 kilometers) west of Caracas, he said.
“The plane went out of control and crashed,” Paz said. “There are no survivors.”
Rescue teams pulled dozens of bodies from the wreckage, which officials said was strewn across a forested area among farms near Venezuela’s border with Colombia.
The French civil aviation authority said all of the passengers were French citizens from Martinique, and confirmed that all died in the crash.
About 150 distraught friends and relatives, many crying, gathered in Martinique outside the city hall of Ducos, a town of 20,000 people where about 30 of the victims reportedly lived.
“The airplane should have landed early this morning. I heard on the radio it had crashed,” said Claire Renette, 40, whose sister was among the victims. “I don’t understand. It’s as though the sky fell on my head today.”
Town officials called in doctors and psychologists. Officials in Martinique said the vacationers included civil servants and their families who had chartered the flight for a one-week trip to Panama.
“There were couples who went away, and so today there are children who are orphans,” Andre Charpentier, mayor of the Martinique town of Basse-Pointe from which 16 of the victims came, said on France’s I-Tele.
French President Jacques Chirac expressed his “strong emotion” as he learned of the “appalling catastrophe” and offered condolences to victims’ families.
The airline, in a statement from Colombia, said 152 passengers, including an infant, and eight Colombian crew members were aboard the MD82, made by McDonnell Douglas. Venezuelan officials confirmed there were 160 aboard, including eight crew members.
The airline said the pilot reported an emergency 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the Colombia-Venezuela border. Authorities said the plane requested permission to attempt an emergency landing at the nearby airport in Maracaibo, Venezuela, but never made it.
It went down in a wooded area between two farms in the western state of Zulia, said German Bracho, the state’s civil protection director.
“Residents in the area said they heard an explosion,” Paz said.
The plane went down just east of the Sierra de Perija mountain range, which runs along the border with Colombia.
Hundreds of rescue workers were searching through the wreckage and had found one of the plane’s black boxes, which could give clues about the crash, said air force Maj. Javier Perez, the search and rescue chief. He said the cockpit voice recorder had yet to be found.
Most of wreckage was spread across little more than 100 meters (110 yards), suggesting the plane had come in at a sharp angle, and did not plane across the ground, said Alfonzo Marquez, mayor of the nearby town of Rosario.
The crash came only two days after a Cypriot airliner plunged into the mountains north of Athens, Greece, killing all 121 people aboard.
Chirac sent France’s minister for overseas territories to Martinique, and opened a crisis center at the Foreign Ministry to maintain contacts with Venezuelan authorities and victims’ families.
French Transport Minister Dominique Perben said West Caribbean Airways had operated a charter since spring between Panama and the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. French aviation authorities checked the plane twice since May but found nothing unusual, he said.
The plane had been chartered by a Martinique travel agency. It had departed from Panama carrying enough fuel for the three-hour trip to Martinique, Panama’s civil aviation agency said in a statement.
Peter Goelz, former managing director of the US National Transportation Safety Board, said investigators would most likely look for evidence of fuel contamination.
“It’s not unusual to lose one engine. It is unusual to lose both,” Goelz said. “One of the first things you always look at is fuel contamination.”
Goelz said he understood both engines recently had work done on them to suppress noise. Within the last few weeks, he said, hush kits — noise-suppression devices — were supplied to the engines.
The United States sent four investigators to Venezuela to help.
West Caribbean Airways, a Colombian airline, began service in 1998. In March, a twin-engine plane it operated crashed during takeoff from the Colombian island of Old Providence, killing eight people and injuring the other six passengers.
The victims yesterday included Colombian flight attendant Angela Patricia Pena Valencia, who according to her father Carlos Pena had not been scheduled to work the flight but was assigned at the last minute.
Pena came to the airline’s office at the Bogota airport hoping for news. Also among the relatives who gathered at the office was Erika Beltran, whose husband Giovanni Fallaci was among the flight attendants.
“His passion was to fly,” Beltran said, weeping. “He will always be with me.” She said they had a 4-year-old daughter.
On the Colombian island of Old Providence, officials at the island’s small airport announced the suspension of all West Caribbean flights. Two dozen stranded passengers huddled around a television, watching news reports of the crash.
“I don’t even want to fly on West Caribbean,” said Olmo Cardoso, a Colombian-Italian student. “Two crashes in such a short period is obviously too much. There’s something wrong.”
Two other plane crashes in Venezuela in the past year both involved military planes. In December, a military plane crashed near Caracas, killing all 16 people on board. In August 2004, a military plane crashed into a mountain in central Venezuela, killing 25 people.
Venezuela’s last major civilian crash was in 2001, when an airplane from the Venezuelan airline Rutaca crashed in southern Venezuela, killing all 24 people on board and injuring three others on the ground.
