Plane crashes in central Cuba, 68 dead

Steyr

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/11/05/cuba.plane.crash/index.html?hpt=T2

Havana, Cuba (CNN)

Search crews combed through charred rubble in central Cuba early Friday after a fiery plane crash killed 68 people, state media reported.

The Aerocaribbean plane was carrying 40 Cubans and 28 foreigners, the state-run website Cubadebate said. None of them survived the crash, the website said.

Photos from the local newspaper Escambray posted on Cubadebate early Friday showed rescue crews using heavy machinery to comb through the debris. Flames still engulfed part of the plane.

The flight was traveling from the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba and heading to the country's capital, Havana, Cubadebate reported.

The Civil Aviation Institute of Cuba said Flight 883 lost contact with air traffic controllers around 5:42 p.m. Thursday (4:42 p.m. ET Thursday), Cubadebate said.

The plane crashed in a rural part of the central province of Sancti Spiritus, Cubadebate said. Residents in the area said the plane made several sudden movements before plunging to the ground.

Authorities were still trying to determine what caused the crash, state media said.

A list of victims posted on the Cubadebate site comprised of 40 Cubans, nine people from Argentina, seven people from Mexico, three people from the Netherlands, two people from Germany, two people from Austria and one person each from Spain, France, Italy, Japan and Venezuela.

Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner ordered a plane to Cuba to retrieve the bodies of the nine victims from her country, according to the state-run Telam news agency of Argentina. The Argentine Foreign Ministry also provided a phone number for relatives of the deceased to call to obtain more information.

Preliminary reports indicate that the plane crashed near the Zaza Reservoir, the largest reservoir in Cuba, according to state media.

All the doctors in Sancti Spiritus have been mobilized, according to a hospital worker who declined to give her name because she was not authorized to speak to the media. The hospital worker said she saw the plane crash from 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) away.

"When it hit the ground, it burst into flames," she said.

The last plane crash in Cuba occurred in March 2002, Cubadebate said, when a plane carrying tourists went down in the central province of Villa Clara. Sixteen people were killed in that crash.

iPlop

What sort of aircraft was this? this is not a good week for aviation..

Steyr

Sink The Banana wrote: »

What sort of aircraft was this? this is not a good week for aviation..

ATR-72-212, I notice there is a trend with Aircraft Incidents worldwide, one is not a once off you will usually have 2 or 3 after one incident.

Steyr

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/cuban-rescuers-reach-crash-plane-68-dead-20101106-17hsq.html

Cuban rescuers reach crash plane, 68 dead Rigoberto Diaz
November 6, 2010 - 5:09AM

AFP

Emergency crews hacked through tropical jungle in central Cuba on Friday to reach the site of the island's worst plane crash in two decades in which all 68 people on board were killed - 28 of them foreigners.

Police used bulldozers to clear vegetation from the debris of the domestic Aerocaribbean aircraft, which crashed in the mountainous Sancti Spiritus region Thursday after the pilot reported an emergency.

"We saw it when it already had problems and was flying low," Miguel Garcia, a 68-year-old farmer who lives close to the crash site, told AFP.

Advertisement: Story continues below "There was a great commotion, people gathered and screamed... and then boom, an explosion," Garcia said.

The first rescuers to get to the crash site overnight found the wreckage in flames.

The plane, a twin turbo-propeller ATR-72-212 built by French-Italian manufacturer Avions de Transport Regional, was heading to Havana after departing the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba.

It had taken off in dangerous weather conditions.

Tomas, then a tropical storm which later strengthened to a hurricane, had already begun to drench eastern Cuba with rain and a warning was issued to aircraft in Santiago de Cuba province before the plane took off.

Cubana Airlines, another state carrier, decided to cancel all flights in and out of Santiago de Cuba and Guantanamo the same day because of the alert.

But Cuba's Civil Aeronautics Institute did not immediately say whether foul weather was a factor in the crash.

"At the moment, aviation and regional authorities are gathering the facts and details and have created a commission to investigate such a regrettable accident," it said in a statement.

Locals who rushed to help at the crash site stressed that the weather was good in their region when the plane came down.

Among the passengers were 10 Europeans, nine Argentines, seven Mexicans, a Venezuelan and a Japanese national, state media reported.

The Europeans included three Dutch, two Germans, two Austrians and one each from France, Italy and Spain.

There were 40 Cubans on board, including the seven crew.

It was not known if the aircraft's black boxes had been recovered.

According to officials, the pilot radioed an "emergency situation" before losing contact.

Many of the foreigners on board the doomed flight were believed to be tourists, and the accident is bad news for the industry. Tourism is the main foreign exchange earner in Cuba, bringing in about $US2 billion ($A1.98 billion) annually.

About 2.4 million people visited the Communist-run Caribbean nation in 2009, mainly from Canada, Britain, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Mexico, Argentina and Russia.

It was the communist-ruled island's worst air disaster in 21 years.

The last passenger plane crash in Cuba occurred in March 2002, when a small Antonov-2 went down in the central province of Villa Clara, killing all 16 people - 12 foreign tourists and four Cuban crew - on board.

The deadliest accident in recent decades occurred in September 1989, when a Soviet-era Ilyushin IL-62 bound for Milan crashed shortly after takeoff from Havana, killing all 115 passengers, 113 of them Italian tourists, as well as several crew members and another 40 people on the ground.

© 2010 AFP

N7777G

Another fatal crash on Friday, this time a Beech 1900 in Pakistan.

see report ...
http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20101105-0

photo ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/eigjb/5154548484/