Spain air crash death toll rises to 153 » Communities » 24dash.com

Authorities are beginning the grim task of identifying 153 victims burned to death when a jet heading to the Canary Islands crashed on take-off.

The holiday season crash at Madrid's Barajas International Airport turned a wooded area off the end of a runway into a hellish scene of charred bodies and smouldering wreckage. It is Spain's worst air disaster in nearly 25 years.

Only 19 people survived yesterday's Spanair MD-82 crash and some were in a critical condition, said Spain's development minister Magdalena Alvarez, whose department oversees civil aviation.

Spanair's website published the names of those on board but not the nationalities. It said 20 of those aboard were children and two others were babies.

The airline did not release a death toll, but said the plane carried 172 passengers and crew.

As smoke billowed from the wreckage, dozens of fire engines and ambulances rushed to help, lining a nearby road and filling a field next to a swath of charred vegetation. Helicopters flew overhead, dumping water on fires.

"The scene is devastating," said Pablo Albella, an emergency rescue worker. "The fuselage is destroyed. The plane burned. I have seen a kilometre of charred land and few whole pieces of the fuselage. It is all destruction."

Rescuers rushed the few survivors to hospitals, while emergency workers shrouded the dead in white sheets. One body lay on burned grass, an arm and a leg poking out.

Later, a long convoy of black hearses rolled on to the airport grounds to carry bodies to a makeshift mortuary set up at Madrid's main convention centre - the same facility used for relatives to identify bodies after the March 11 2004 Islamic terror attacks that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.

Mourners went to a special waiting area, avoiding photographers and reporters.

It was not immediately clear what went wrong. Ms Alvarez said the plane had barely become airborne when it veered right, crashed and broke into pieces.

Spanair, a Spanish company wholly owned by Scandinavian Airlines, said it did not know what caused the accident. Ms Alvarez said investigators ruled out foul play and considered the crash an accident. She said the plane's flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.

While preparing for a first take-off attempt, the plane's pilot reported a breakdown in a gauge that measures temperature outside the plane. The gauge was fixed, delaying the departure, said Spanair spokeswoman Susana Vergara.

It was on the second take-off attempt that the plane crashed.

Spanair Flight JK5022 originated in Barcelona and was heading for the city of Las Palmas. It was a code-share with Flight LH255 of the German carrier Lufthansa.

The accident was Spain's worst air disaster since 1983, when a Boeing 747 operated by the Colombian airline Avianca crashed near Madrid on landing approach, killing 181 people. In 1985, an Iberia Boeing 727 crashed near Bilbao in the Basque region, killing 148 people.

The deadliest disaster in aviation history occurred in Spain in 1977. Two fully loaded Boeing 747s collided on a runway in the Canary Islands and a total of 583 people died.

Prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero broke off his holiday in southern Spain and rushed back to Madrid. He expressed his condolences to people who lost loved ones and later headed to the mortuary to comfort mourners.

Sergio Allard, a Spanair spokesman, said the crashed plane passed an inspection in January and no problems had been reported since then. The plane was 15 years old and had been owned by Spanair the past nine, he said.

The DC-9/MD-80 family of twin-engine, medium-range jets enjoyed wide popularity among the world's airlines in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

But it has had a number of fatal accidents, the deadliest of which was a crash of Slovenia's Adria Airways flight in Corsica in 1981, when all 180 people on board perished.

In Copenhagen, Mats Jansson, the chief executive of Spanair's owner, Scandinavian Airlines, said he had no information about the accident itself.

Mr Jansson and his deputy, John Dueholm, were on their way home from the Beijing Olympics when they learned about the accident and immediately decided to fly to Madrid with a team of crisis counsellors.

"We want to be on location ... there are many questions," Mr Jansson said before heading to Spain.

Spanair has a fleet of more than 60 aircraft and runs around 600 flights daily.