Airliner With 152 On Board Crashes In Venezuela
By VOA News
16 August 2005



A Colombian passenger jet with 152 people on board has crashed in western Venezuela.

Venezuela's Interior Minister Jesse Chacon says it is unlikely anyone survived the crash of the West Caribbean Airways jet. He based that assessment on reports from Venezuelan military planes that flew over the crash site as rescue efforts began.

The plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-80, was flying from Panama to the French Caribbean island of Martinique Tuesday when its pilot reported trouble with both engines.

The jet crashed a short time later in the Sierra de Perija mountains.


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By IAN JAMES, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, August 16, 2005



(08-16) 06:29 PDT CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) --


A commercial airliner with at least 158 people aboard crashed in western Venezuela early Tuesday after reporting engine trouble. A top government official said it was unlikely anyone survived.


The West Caribbean Airways plane was en route from Panama to the Caribbean island of Martinique when its pilot reported trouble with both engines to Caracas' air control tower at around 3 a.m., said Francisco Paz, president of the National Aviation Institute.


Airport authorities lost radio contact with the plane about 10 minutes later, when the plane was in the area of Machiques, 400 miles west of Caracas in the western border state of Zulia, he said.


"Residents in the area said they heard an explosion," Paz said.


Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said that based on reports from military aircraft flying over the area, "it's very unlikely there could be survivors."


The plane had been chartered for tourists, and 152 passengers were listed on the flight plan, Paz said.


Colombia's RCN Radio reported that West Caribbean said in a press release that there were also eight crew members aboard. Col. Carlos Eduardo Montealegre, acting director of Colombia's civil aviation regulator Aerocivil, told RCN that six crew members were aboard and that all were Colombian.


The plane "” an MD82, made by McDonnell Douglas "” crashed 20 miles east of Venezuela's border with Colombia, according to the radio report.


West Caribbean Airways, a Colombian airline, began service in 1998. In March, a twin-engine plane operated by the airline crashed during takeoff from the Colombian island of Old Providence, killing eight people.


Two other 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.


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Colombian Jet Crashes in Venezuela, Killing 160 (Update11)
Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A Colombian airliner carrying French tourists crashed early this morning in a mountainous region in western Venezuela, killing all 160 people on board.

The Medellin, Colombia-based West Caribbean Airways SA jet was en route to the French Caribbean island of Martinique from Panama when it came down in the Sierra de Perija on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, according to Venezuela's civil aviation agency. The plane, a charter flight, was carrying 152 passengers, all French nationals, and eight crew members, a French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said.

``There is a large number of bodies at the crash site,'' National Guard Major Javier Perez, who is overseeing the rescue operations, said in an interview with Globovision from the area near Machiques, Venezuela where the plane went down. ``We are trying to recover all the bodies.''

The crash is the second this year for West Caribbean, according to Colombia's civil aviation authority. On March 26, a West Caribbean airplane crashed en route to San Andres island from Providencia island, killing seven passengers and two crew members.

Airline Debt

Col. Carlos Eduardo Montealegre, a spokesman for the Colombian civil aviation agency, said the airline has ``financial troubles'' and was under observation by the government. John Ospina, spokesman for West Caribbean, denied the government's claims in a telephone interview from Medellin.

``We don't have financial difficulties,'' he said. ``What we have are outstanding credits.'' Among money owed to the airline is 2.88 billion pesos ($1.25 million) owed by the national army, Ospina said.

The airline will continue to operate, company President Jorge Perez said in an interview with W Radio.

The doomed jetliner was also inspected last night outside Medellin, Montealegre said.

Venezuela's Interior and Justice Minister Jesse Chacon said at a televised press conference that one of the jet's black boxes, or flight recorders, had been recovered, and would be analyzed. All the crew members were Colombians.

Investigators recovered at least 56 bodies, who were airlifted to a makeshift morgue in the western oil city of Maracaibo.

Chirac

French President Jacques Chirac called today's crash a ``shocking catastrophe'' and said in a statement he sent Overseas Territories Minister Francois Baroin to Venezuela.

The aircraft radioed ground authorities at 3:07 a.m. local time (3:07 a.m. in New York), saying it had problems with one of its engines, Francisco Paz, who heads Venezuela's civil aviation agency, told Union Radio. Ten minutes later the plane reported problems with a second engine, Chacon said. The plane probably crashed between 3:30 a.m. and 3:45 a.m., he said.

The aircraft went down near Machiques, a town about 150 kilometers (90 miles) southwest of Maracaibo, Chacon said on national television. The company identified the aircraft as a Boeing Co. MD-82.

Explosion

Residents in the area said they heard a large explosion at 5 a.m., Chacon said. One witness told local radio the plane fell in a ball of fire, according to Agence France Presse.

West Caribbean was founded in December 1998, according to the airline's Web site. The carrier flies two MD-81s, and one MD-82, as well as smaller craft.

Boeing discontinued the MD-80 series in December 1999. Boeing acquired the model, which entered service in 1980, with its purchase of McDonnell Douglas Corp. in 1997.

AMR Corp.'s American Airlines operates the largest fleet of MD-80s consisting of 275 of the planes. The West Caribbean plane wasn't purchased directly from Boeing, according to Boeing's Web site.

The West Caribbean accident comes two days after a Boeing 737 flown by a Cypriot airliner crashed, killing all 121 passengers and crew aboard in Greece's worst air disaster.

Venezuela's last commercial airline crash occurred in January 2001, when a DC-3 belonging to Rutaca Airlines went down, killing 24 people.



To contact the reporter on this story:
Peter Wilson in Caracas at pewilson@bloomberg.net, and
Andrea Jaramillo in Bogota at ajaramillo@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: August 16, 2005 15:31 EDT
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000086&sid=amy...&refer=latin_america

Experts weigh Venezuela crash theories
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) "” Investigators have not ruled out the possibility that a plane that crashed in Venezuela ran out of fuel before it plunged to the ground, but are considering a range of potential causes, an emergency official said Sunday.

Shortly before Tuesday's crash, the pilot radioed authorities saying both engines had failed. All 152 passengers and eight crew members were killed on the flight from Panama to the French Caribbean island of Martinique.

"The investigators are trying to determine if the accident was due to a technical or human problem," Venezuelan emergency agency chief Col. Antonio Rivero said in the western city of Maracaibo. "It also hasn't been ruled out whether or not there was a sufficient amount of fuel."

Aviation officials in Panama said they believe the plane had plenty of fuel for the three-hour trip, and that they have found no evidence of fuel contamination.

Venezuelan investigators said they planned to take apart the engines to study what could have caused both to fail.

Rivero said the search for victims had concluded.

"From now on the crash site will be closed by order of prosecutors and investigators" "” cordoned off for detailed examination of the wreckage, Rivero said.

Venezuelan investigators, working with French and Colombian counterparts, plan to begin removing pieces of the wreckage this week and moving them to an enclosed area to try to reconstruct the West Caribbean Airways jet, he said.

Forensic specialists at a morgue in Maracaibo were using dental records and fingerprints to help identify victims. They said they also planned to use DNA testing.

The eight crew members were quickly identified, and on Friday their coffins were flown home to Colombia. But officials said it could take up to three weeks for other remains to be sent back to Martinique because victims had been torn apart and identification is proving difficult.

The crash near Machiques, 400 miles west of Caracas, was the deadliest in Venezuelan history, according to the Aviation Safety Network.

Colombia's government has grounded West Caribbean Airways while its civil air authority reviews inspections that the small Colombian airline had been required to perform.

The airline has said it did not cut corners on safety and that the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 passed a safety inspection the day before it crashed.


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http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-08-21-venezuela-plane-crash_x.htm

Cypriot Pilot Cried 'Mayday!' Two Seconds Before Crash
Monday, August 22, 2005
ATHENS, Greece "” The last man conscious in the cockpit of a doomed Cypriot airliner made a desperate call for help "” "Mayday! Mayday!" "” two seconds before the plane carrying 121 people smashed into a mountain near Athens.

The man, apparently a flight attendant with pilot training, twice issued distress calls in the final 10 minutes of Helios Airways Flight 522, chief investigator Akrivos Tsolakis told The Associated Press on Monday.

"The second time was a couple of seconds before the crash," Tsolakis said, adding the man had "a very weak tone of voice."

Earlier Monday, Tsolakis issued a preliminary report on the Aug. 14 crash, which killed all 115 passengers and six crew, that said the Boeing 737-300 lost cabin pressure and eventually ran out of fuel.

The report was the most comprehensive statement the government has released on the investigation since the crash. It came after pressure from the media and the airline industry for Greece and Cyprus to start answering questions about what caused the accident.

Still, it remained unclear what caused the loss of cabin pressure. Greek investigators, aided by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, are continuing to probe the crash, the deadliest airline disaster for Greece and Cyprus and considered one of the most baffling in aviation history.

Tsolakis presented his initial findings following analysis of flight recorders and autopsies on all 118 bodies "” many still unidentified "” recovered from the site. Three bodies have not been found, including that of the plane's pilot, a German.

"The crash is like an explosion and the pilot's body may not necessarily have ended up close to the cockpit," Tsolakis told state-run NET television. "He may be one of the [recovered] unidentified bodies."

The report appears to confirm initial suspicions that people aboard the Helios Airways plane were incapacitated by a loss of cabin pressure early in the flight at about 34,000 feet and that someone tried to save the flight shortly before it crashed.

On the day of the crash, two Greek air force F-16 fighter planes were scrambled to intercept the flight shortly before the accident.

Pilots reported seeing the co-pilot slumped over the controls, apparently unconscious, and the pilot not in his seat. On their second pass by the airliner, the F-16 pilots saw two people in the cockpit, apparently trying to take control of the plane.

According to the report issued Monday, a man wearing an oxygen mask, believed to be 25-year-old flight attendant Andreas Prodromou, tried to steer the plane for the last 10 minutes and contact air-traffic control authorities.

In his first appeal, he cried "Mayday!" three times "” but the plane's communications had apparently been set to the wrong frequency, Tsolakis said.

It remains unclear how the would-be rescuer stayed conscious.

The Helios flight from Larnaca, Cyprus (search), to Athens ran out of fuel before crashing near the scenic village of Grammatiko, 25 miles north of Athens, the report said.

The plane crashed in Greece after circling for more than an hour in a holding pattern above the Aegean Sea island of Kea, southeast of Athens International Airport.

"There are indications of technical problems in the pressurization system... There is proof that the engines of the plane stopped working because the fuel supply was exhausted, and that this was the final cause of the crash," the two-page report said.

A former chief mechanic at Helios said last week that the same plane lost cabin pressure during a flight from Warsaw, Poland, in December, after a door apparently was not sealed properly.

Both Athens and Nicosia have come under strong public pressure to reveal all they know about the crash, in part to calm worries that terrorism or criminal action or neglect was the cause. Police searched Helios offices shortly after the accident.

Tsolakis said the investigation was making good progress.

"I am a conservative guy but I can judge it as a very fast-moving one," he said.

The full report on the Helios disaster is due in about six months. The government, which has said it will not comment on an ongoing investigation, has promised to make the report public.


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