U.S. airliner crashes, killing 144

Press, 10 February 1989, Page 1

U.S. airliner crashes, killing 144

NZPA-Reuter ; Santa Maria, A United States airliner packed with Italian tourists crashed into a mist-shrouded peak in the Azores, in the midAtlantic, yesterday, ! killing all 144 people aboard. The chartered Boeing 707 crashed as it tried to land in Santa Maria for scheduled refuelling on a holiday flight from the Italian city of Bergamo to the Dominican Republic. “There were mutilated bodies

everywhere. Nobody had a chance of survival,” said a Portuguese local official as exhausted rescue teams brought down the bodies of more than 50 victims in plastic sheets. Almost all the 137 passengers came from northern Italy. The seven crew members were American. Wreckage and bodies were strewn over a wide area of the 587 m high Pico Alto, the highest mountain on the tiny island of 5000 inhabitants. A spokesman for Independent Air Incorporated, which leased

the Azores flight, said there was no immediate clue to the cause of the crash, the worst in Portuguese aviation history. Some residents reported seeing flames from the plane before the crash, but airport officials said the, pilot had not reported any problems as the plane prepared to make its final approach from 1000 m. The island’s airport, a main staging post for the Allies during World War 11, is seldom used now although Portuguese pilots described landing there as “straightforward and safe.”

Yesterday’s air disaster was the third involving Boeing aircraft In recent months. — . < A Pan Am jumbo jet exploded over the Scottish, town, of Lockerbie on December 21 after a bomb was placed on the aircraft. All 259 people on board and 11 people on the; ground were killed. -,-i: -- Three weeks Jater, 47 people died—when a British - Midland Airways Boeing 737 crashed on one of England’s busiest motorways. ■ , .

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