LIMA, 25 August 2005 — Rescuers combed a jungle marsh yesterday for victims of a Peruvian airliner that split in two after an emergency landing during a hailstorm, killing 41 people. Fifty-seven people escaped the burning wreckage, wading away through knee-deep mud. TANS Peru Flight 204 was the world’s fifth major airline accident in August, making it the deadliest month for plane disasters in three years.
The Boeing 737-200 was carrying 98 people, including a crew of six, on a domestic flight from the Peruvian capital of Lima to the Amazon city of Pucallpa, airline spokesman Jorge Belevan said at a news conference in giving the first extensive details of the accident. It had previously said an estimated 100 people were aboard.
Belevan said there were at least 57 survivors. On Tuesday night, police Lt. David Mori had told The Associated Press that 41 bodies had been recovered, 56 survivors were being treated at hospitals and three people were still missing.
In strong winds and torrential rains, the pilot circled the airport, then tried to make an emergency landing about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away. He aimed for the marsh to soften the impact, but the landing split the aircraft, said Edwin Vasquez, president of the Ucayali region where the city is located.
Wind shear — a potentially dangerous sudden change in wind speed or direction, often during a thunderstorm — possibly botched the emergency landing, said TANS spokesman Jorge Belevan. He said there did not appear to have been a technical failure in the 22-year-old aircraft.
Search teams have recovered the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, said Pablo Arevalo, a prosecutor in the jungle city of Pucallpa.
Among the dead were at least three foreigners — an American woman, an Italian man and a Colombian woman, Mori said. Many bodies could not immediately be identified.
In Lima, relatives of passengers and crew were at the airport trying to board a special flight to Pucallpa.
Jose Reyna, 30, said he had come with three siblings to say farewell to their father, Jose Lino Reyna, 57, a medical technician killed in the crash. Only one of his brothers got on the plane. “My father died and they have identified him. They recognized him by his clothes and his cell phone,” Reyna said.
“I felt a strong impact and a light and fire. (I) felt I was in the middle of flames around the cabin, until I saw to my left a hole to escape through,” survivor Yuri Salas told the broadcaster Radioprogramas. “Two other people were struggling to get out and I also was able to.”
He said he heard another person shouting to him to keep advancing because the plane was going to explode. “The fire was fierce despite the storm,” he said. “Hail was falling and the mud came up to my knees.”
Last week, 160 people died when a Colombian-registered West Caribbean charter went down in Venezuela. Two days earlier, 121 people died when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing plunged into the mountains north of Athens.
Sixteen people were believed to have died Aug. 6 when a plane operated by Tunisia’s Tuninter crashed off Sicily. In Toronto, all 309 people survived aboard an Air France Airbus A340 that overshot the runway on Aug. 2.
