A passenger plane overshot a runway and raced onto a busy street in the Honduran capital on Friday, killing the pilot, two passengers and a motorist on the ground. At least 65 people were injured.
The Grupo Taca Airbus A320 with 140 people on board was flying a Los Angeles-San Salvador-Tegucigalpa route and was scheduled to head on to Miami, Florida. It ended with its nose smashed against a roadside embankment and its fuselage buckled and broken in places.
Honduran authorities frantically hosed down cars trapped beneath the wreckage as thousands of liters of fuel gushed from the jet.
Rescuers pried open part of the wreckage to get the pilot and co-pilot out, but the pilot didn’t survive, said Cesar Villalta, director of Honduras’ military hospital.
Passenger Harry Brautigam, a Nicaraguan who headed a regional development bank, died of heart failure. The body of a man trapped under the wreckage was believed to be a taxi driver.
Janneth Shantall, the wife of Brazilian Ambassador Brian Michael Fraser Neele, was also killed in the crash. The former head of Honduras’ armed forces, General Daniel Lopez Carballo, was also among the injured.
A statement from the office of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya said the flight originated in Los Angeles and that 65 people were injured in crash. Taca spokeswoman Sofia Valverde said the flight had been scheduled to continue on to Miami.
Following the crash, officials acknowledged that the runways of Tegucigalpa’s aging Toncontin International Airport are short and its approach paths are dangerous. The airport is ringed by hills, posing a special challenge for pilots.
There was no official cause given for the crash, but weather may have also been a factor. The runway was wet with rain from Tropical Storm Alma.
“The plane inexplicably circled the city twice and it ran out of runway because it landed more than halfway down’’ the length of the strip, airport manager Carlos Ramos told the Channel 7 television network.
The plane “didn’t touch down were they normally do, at the start of the runway ... and that is being investigated,” Ramos said.
Many passengers walked away from the accident.
Mirtila Lopez, 71, said she was talking to another passenger when the plane “left the runway, hit electric cables from a nearby street and then got stuck in the side of a small ravine.”
Taca released a statement saying that 60 of the passengers were from Honduras, 17 from Costa Rica, and nine from Argentina. There were seven Americans, three Mexicans, two Spaniards, two Brazilians and two Colombians aboard. Almost all the remainder were from other Central American countries.
Honduran air officials said they would close the terminal to large jets and permanently transfer those flights to the former military airfield at Palmerola.
Larger jets will now operate out of Palmerola, also known as the Soto Cano base, about 45km north of the capital.
Used by the US during the Central American civil wars of the 1980s, Palmerola has the best runway in the country, at 2,700m long and 50m wide, and is used most for drug surveillance planes.
There have been calls for years to replace the aging Toncontin airport, whose short runway, primitive navigation equipment and neighboring hills make it one of the world’s more dangerous international airports.
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