apparently no one survived
Plane Crash in Venezuela Leaves 160 Dead
By IAN JAMES
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - A plane carrying vacationers home to the French Caribbean island of Martinique crashed Tuesday 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., 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 west of Caracas, he said.
``The plane went out of control and crashed,'' said 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. They also 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.
The French civil aviation authority said all the passengers were French citizens from Martinique.
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 had been on the plane. ``I don't understand. It's as though the sky fell on my head today.''
Town officials brought 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.
French President Jacques Chirac expressed his ``strong emotion'' as he learned of the ``appalling catastrophe'' and offered condolences to families of victims.
He 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.
The airline, in a statement from Colombia, said 152 passengers, including an infant, and eight Colombian crew members were aboard the plane. Venezuelan officials confirmed there were 160 aboard, including eight crew members.
The airline said the pilot reported an emergency 20 miles 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 director of civil protection.
``Residents in the area said they heard an explosion,'' Paz said.
French Transport Minister Dominique Perben said West Caribbean Airways had operated a charter since spring between Panama and the French Caribbean departments of Martinique and Guadeloupe.
French aviation authorities checked the plane twice since May but found nothing unusual, he said. For this flight, the plane had been chartered by a Martinique travel agency, he said.
Peter Goelz, former managing director of the U.S. 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 that both engines had 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.
In the Colombian island of Old Providence, officials at the island's small airport announced the suspension Tuesday of all West Caribbean flights, without giving a reason.
Two dozen stranded passengers huddled around a television in Old Providence's palm-studded airport, watching news reports of the crash.
``I don't even want to fly on West Caribbean, even if they offer a flight,'' said Olmo Cardoso, a Colombian-Italian student visiting relatives on Old Providence. ``Two crashes in such a short period is obviously too much. There's something wrong.''
Two other airplane crashes in Venezuela in the past year both involved military planes. In December, a military plane crashed in a mountainous area 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 people on the ground.
Tuesday's crash came only two days after a Cypriot airliner plunged into the mountains north of Athens, Greece, killing all 121 people aboard.
Associated Press writers Herve Brival in Ducos, Martinique; Jocelyn Gecker in Paris; Kim Housego in Old Providence, Colombia; and Juan Pablo Toro in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.
08/16/05 14:03
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