More than a hundred dead after Cuban flight crashes on take-off
More than a hundred people have died after a Boeing 737 airliner crashed and exploded near Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, according to Cuban media sources.
Three survivors have reportedly been taken to hospital in a critical condition after the plane crashed on take-off.
The plane, with 104 passengers and nine foreign crew aboard, ploughed into a farm field where firefighters sprayed the charred fuselage with hoses.
Residents living near the site said they saw at least some survivors being taken away in ambulances.
A military officer said there appear to have been three survivors in a critical condition.
“It’s a disaster,” the officer told local media sources.
The plane was leased to state airline Cubana de Aviación. It has placed many of its planes out of service due to maintenance problems in recent months.
Firefighters rushed to extinguish flames engulfing the plane, which was meant to be on a short trip to the eastern Cuban city of Holguin.
Government officials including president Miguel Diazcanel rushed to the site, along with a large number of emergency medical workers.
Mr Diaz-canel told reporters: “There has been an unfortunate aviation accident. The news is not very promising, it seems that there is a high number of victims”.
On Thursday, Cuban first vice-president Salvador Valdes Mesa met with Cubana officials to discuss improvements to its service.
The airline is notorious for its frequent delays and cancellations, which Cubana blames on a lack of parts and planes due to the US trade embargo imposed on the island.
Friday’s crash was Cuba’s third major accident since 2010.
Last year a Cuban military plane crashed into a hillside in the western province of Artemisa, killing eight soldiers on board.
In November 2010, an Aerocaribbean flight from Santiago to Havana went down in bad weather as it flew over central Cuba, killing all 68 people on board, including 28 foreigners, in what was the country’s worst air disaster in more than two decades.
The last accident involving a Cubana-operated plane was in September 1989, when a charter flight from Havana to Milan, Italy, went down shortly after takeoff, killing all 126 people on board, as well as at least two dozen on the ground.
Cubana’s director general, Captain Hermes Hernandez Dumas, told state media last month that the airline’s domestic flights had carried 11,700 more passengers than planned between January and April 2018, with 64 per cent of flights taking off on time.
newsdeskts@scotsman.com