Scores dead as Cuban airliner crashes
A Cuban airliner carrying more than 100 people crashed and burned shortly after takeoff from Havana on Friday, killing all but three people aboard, Cuba’s official media reported.
As emergency responders rushed to the scene, footage from the crash site showed plumes of thick black smoke rising. The crushed fuselage, seemingly ripped in pieces, lay in thick vegetation as firefighters doused it with hoses. A crowd rushed in and pulled away at least one person on a stretcher from the tangled remains of the plane.
State television said the flight had been headed to Holguin, on the eastern part of the island. The plane, a Boeing 737 leased by Cubana de Aviacion, a state-run Cuban airline, was nearly 39 years old, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency, making it one of the older 737s still in commercial operation.
The plane crashed at 12:08 p.m. just after it had departed Jose Martí International Airport, Cuba’s state newspaper, Granma, reported on its website. It said the flight, DMJ 0972, carried 105 people, including at least five children. The UN civil aviation agency said it also carried nine crew members.
Their nationalities were not immediately clear. Granma’s account initially said all aboard were foreigners but later deleted that passage without explanation.
One male passenger was pronounced dead after being taken to the hospital. Three female survivors were receiving treatment, according to Granma.
Cuba’s new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, travelled to the site of the crash to oversee recovery efforts along with Health Minister Roberto Morales.
“The news is not very hopeful,” Díaz-Canel told Cuban state television.
Cubana has struggled to overcome a reputation for poor safety after a string of crashes left dozens of people dead in the late 1990s.
In 1997, a Cubana flight crashed off the island’s southeast coast three minutes after take off, killing about 40 people.
A year later, around 80 people were killed when a Cubana plane crashed into a field after taking off from the airport in Quito, Ecuador. In December 1999, dozens of people, many of them Guatemalan medical students, died when a Cubana flight skidded off the runway in Guatemala City. A week after that, another Cubana flight crashed into a mountain in Venezuela, killing all 22 people aboard.
There was confusion over which airline had leased the plane that crashed Friday to Cubana. Initial state media reports said it belonged to Blue Panorama, an Italian company. But Blue Panorama said its plane was not involved. When reached by phone, an employee at Damojh Airlines, a Mexican company also known as Global Air, confirmed the plane belonged to the company.
Damojh Airlines began operations in 1990, and counts three airplanes among its fleet, according to a statement from the Mexican Secretary of Transportation.
The statement said that as recently as November the aircraft had been inspected as part of an annual program, and that its planes had passed a safety test administered by the government agency. In addition, the airline was up to date on its permits and was authorized to lease the planes domestically and abroad, including to Cubana.
The crash came against the backdrop of Cuba’s struggle to improve commercial aviation on the island nation, which has long faced economic constraints from the United States embargo.
A day before the crash, Cuban state newspapers reported on a meeting Cuba’s new vice president, Salvador Valdes Mesa, held with key officials from the island’s aviation sector to discuss challenges.
The report said that Roberto Pena Samper, president of the Cuban Aviation Corp., bemoaned that the “embargo placed by successive American administrations prevents” the island “from acquiring the resources necessary to operate a larger fleet of planes and to enhance airport services.”
Cubana suspended its domestic flights in March, several news outlets reported. Radio Marti, the U.S. government-funded website, posted a photo of a sign on the airline’s door showing that all the flights had been cancelled.
A security guard told Radio Marti that there were “literally no planes,” and added that the ones that remain are “in very bad condition.”