Passenger Plane Carrying 160 People Crashes in Venezuela
By BRIAN ELLSWORTH
and JUAN FORERO
Published: August 16, 2005
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 16 -- An airliner carrying 160 passengers and crew members crashed into a mountain in northern Venezuela early today after reporting engine trouble, killing all aboard, aviation authorities said.The plane, an MD-82 made by McDonnell Douglas and operated by West Caribbean Airways of Colombia, was carrying French vacationers to Martinique from Panama when the pilots reported engine problems to Venezuelan air-traffic controllers at 3:07 a.m., the authorities in Venezuela said. Ten minutes later, the controllers lost radio contact.
The plane crashed in the Sierra de Perija mountain range just inside Venezuela's rugged northwestern border with Colombia, Venezuela's interior minister, Jesse Chacon, said. The remains of the plane were spread across a wide swath not far from the town of Machiques, which is about 90 miles southwest of Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-largest city.
West Caribbean Flight 708 first reported problems to controllers at Maiquetía Símon Bolivar International Airport outside Caracas, according to Francisco Paz, president of the country's aeronautical authority, the National Civil Aviation Institute.
"They asked what kind of problems they were having, and the pilots indicated that it was a technical problem in the engines," Mr. Paz told Union Radio in Caracas. "Ten minutes after this communication with the tower, the signal was lost."
Delfín García, an official with the search and rescue division of the National Aviation Institute, said that the pilots had, upon reporting problems with one engine, asked for permission to descend to 31,000 feet. Mr. García said the pilots then reported trouble with the second engine and asked to go down to 14,000 feet.
"It started to fall at a speed of 7,000 feet a minute," Mr. Chacon, the interior minister, said.
Rural residents of the Perija range reported hearing a loud explosion.
A spokesman at the French Embassy in Caracas, Felipa Lozano, said most of the 152 passengers were French. They were traveling from vacation in Panama to Martinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean where many lived. The eight crew members were Colombian.
A field hospital was set up but by late morning, with rescuers having reached the crash scene, it was becoming increasingly clear that there were no survivors. Military helicopters were dispatched to the crash site, which is located between two farms, to ferry bodies to a morgue in Maracaibo.
"We hope to find someone alive, but as you know no one usually survives these kinds of accidents," Col. Castor Perez Leal of the National Guard told Venezuela's Globovision television. "We are prepared for the worst."
The authorities did find the flight recorder, which investigators hoped would provide details of Flight 708's journey. But the so-called black box had not been examined as of early this afternoon, and the authorities said that it was too early to tell what might have prompted the engines to falter.
In Paris, President Jacques Chirac said that he was "deeply saddened" by the crash and had directed the French Foreign Ministry to open a crisis center for the relatives of those aboard the aircraft. The French government, noting that many of the passengers lived in Martinique, dispatched the minister in charge of French territories, Francois Baroin, to the island.
"The president, in the name of all the French, expresses his sad condolences and his profound compassion to the families of the victims and to those close to them," Mr. Chirac said in a statement issued in Paris.
West Caribbean, which began flying in 1998, is based in the Colombian city of Medellin, mainly offering service to northern Colombian and the Caribbean. In March, a twin-engine plane crashed during take-off from the small Colombian island of Providencia, killing eight people.
According to Agence-France Presse, the French transport minister, Dominique Perben, said that West Caribbean's MD-82 had been inspected twice by the French authorities in Martinique over recent months and that no mechanical problems had been detected.
Martinique is one of four overseas departments administered by France; the others are Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Reunion.
Brian Ellsworth reported from Caracas for this article, and Juan Forero reported from Bogotá.
