Never has aircraft crash killed so many and been so ghastly in recent years.
PARIS — At least 45 people died Wednesday and another 44 were injured when an airliner on route to the Canary Islands of Spain swerved off the end of a runway at Madrid airport, Spanish officials said.
Fatal McDonnell Douglas MD80 Events
(airsafe.com)
“There were 178 passengers on board including the crew,” said Valentin Narro, a government official at the Interior Ministry’s office for Madrid. “There are 45 dead and 44 injured.”
A Red Cross official at the airport said the aircraft, Spanair flight JK5022, swerved off the runway during take-off.
Mr. Narro could not confirm whether the aircraft had caught fire. Television footage of the accident showed clouds of white smoke billowing over the runway at Barajas airport in Madrid. Spanair said the accident happened at 2:45 p.m., Madrid time.
Olivia Acosta, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross at Barajas airport, said 22 ambulances were at the scene of the accident and that a makeshift hospital had been set up.
“There are teams of psychosocial workers to help the victims in a difficult moment,” she said.
The Scandinavian airline SAS, which fully owns Spanair, a troubled low-cost carrier, confirmed that an accident had taken place at the Madrid airport involving Spanair flight JK5022 from Madrid to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. The plane model was an MD-80.
The MD-80 is a long, narrow plane with engines mounted to the rear of the fuselage and the tail high in the air.
In April, the Federal Aviation Administration inspected some American Airline Boeing MD-80s and found a maintenance problem: wiring bundles that had been improperly wrapped and attached inside wheel wells. The airline was forced to cancel 3,300 flights.
The wiring is required to be stowed in a way to avoid chafing by moving parts in the wheel well, which otherwise could result in an electric short.
Spanair, founded in 1986, is part of Scandinavian Air Systems, known as S.A.S. It has hubs in Madrid and Barcelona and flies within Spain and Europe, as well as West Africa.
The airline, which carried 11.2 million passengers last year, is part of the Star Alliance, which also includes United Airlines, Air Canada, S.A.S., and Lufthansa of Germany.
However, S.A.S. tried to sell the money-losing airline last year, only to drop the effort in June after it could not find a buyer. Spain’s largest airline, Iberia, pulled out of discussions, and later launched separate merger talks with British Airways.
On Wednesday, before word of the crash, Spanair pilots had threatened to go on strike at the airline, saying management did not have a plan to fix the problems at the carrier.
It lost $81 million in the first half of the year, and S.A.S. has said that it plans to cut a quarter of Spanair’s flights and eliminate about 1,000 jobs, or about a third of its employees.
The majority of Spanair’s fleet is from the MD-80 family, although it also flies Boeing and Airbus jets.
SAS said that it was doing “everything possible to help passengers and next-of-kin and to assist Spanish authorities at this difficult time.”
Spanair said that the flight was a code-share flight with Lufthansa LH 2554, and that it had set up an emergency number for relatives of passengers.
"Spanair is doing everything possible to assist the Spanish authorities at this difficult time," it said in a statement.
The plane had been headed to Gran Canaria, the biggest island in Spain’s Canary Islands, which are a popular vacation destination off the West African coast.
Micheline Maynard contributed reporting.
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