Plane with 110 aboard crashes in Havana field
3 survivors found amid the wreckage near Cuba airport
HAVANA — A 39-yearold airliner with 110 people aboard crashed and burned in a cassava field just after taking off from the Havana airport Friday, leaving three survivors in Cuba’s worst aviation disaster in three decades, officials said.
The Boeing 737 went down just after noon a short distance from the end of the runway at Jose Marti International Airport while on a short-hop flight to the eastern city of Holguin. Firefighters rushed to extinguish the flames that engulfed the field of debris left where Cubana Flight 972 hit the ground.
“There is a high number of people who appear to have died,” Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said from the scene. “Things have been organized, the fire has been put out, and the remains are being identified.”
Four crash survivors were taken to a Havana Firefighters extinguish flames after a Boeing 737 crashed into a field Friday in Havana. hospital, and three remained alive, hospital director Martinez Blanco told Cuban state TV.
State media reports stopped short of declaring that the rest on board were dead.
Relatives of those aboard were ushered into a private area at the terminal to await word on their loved ones.
“My daughter is 24, my God, she’s only 24!” cried Beatriz Pantoja, whose daughter Leticia was on the plane.
State TV said the jet veered to the right after takeoff, and Diaz- Canel said a special commission had been formed to investi- gate the cause of the crash.
“The only thing we heard, when we were checking in, an explosion, the lights went out in the airport and we looked out and saw black smoke rising and they told us a plane had crashed,” Argentine tourist Brian Horanbuena said at the airport.
Skies were overcast and rainy at the airport at the time of the incident, with winds reportedly around 4 mph.
Authorities said there were 104 passengers and six crew members on the flight operated by the Cuban state airline. Mexican authorities said the Boeing 737-201 was built in 1979 and rented by Cubana from Aerolineas Damojh, a small charter company that also goes by the name Global Air.
In November 2010 a Global Air flight originating in Mexico City made an emergency landing in Puerto Vallarta because its front landing gear did not deploy. The fire was quickly extinguished, and none of the 104 people aboard were injured. That plane was a 737 first put into service in 1975.
In Mexico City, two women who said they were relatives of Global Air crew members appeared at the company’s offices. They declined to identify themselves or their relatives and said they were still awaiting information from Global Air.
Cubana has had a generally good safety record but is notorious for delays and cancellations and has taken many of its planes out of service because of maintenance problems in recent months, prompting it to hire charter aircraft from other companies.
The last deadly accident involving a Cubana-operated plane was in 1989, when a charter flight from Havana to Milan, Italy, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 126 people on board and at least two dozen on the ground.