Spanish Pilot’s Map Didn’t Show Mountain or Tower

Iberia Airlines admitted Wednesday that the pilot of a jetliner that clipped a television tower and smashed into a mountain, killing all 148 people aboard, was supplied with a faulty map but insisted that was not the cause of the tragedy.

Aviation officials said pilot Jose Luis Patino was flying the Boeing 727 off course and too low Tuesday when the plane slammed into 3,078-foot Mt. Oiz, 18 miles from Bilbao in the northern Basque region, on a flight from Madrid. They offered no explanation for the incorrect course.

Three Americans were killed in the crash, the third major air disaster in Spain in less than 15 months, along with Bolivian Labor Minister Gonzalo Guzman Eguez.

“Something’s wrong in Spanish aviation when there are so many accidents,” said pilots’ union President Manuel Lopez, who charged that Tuesday’s crash was the result of a faulty map supplied by Iberia to its aviators. He said the 1981 map did not show the mountain or the tower.

Iberia President Carlos Espinosa acknowledged that the map was faulty but said this “did not explain the accident.”

“The weather presented no problem. And the plane was only five years old,” he said.

Search for Bodies

More than 700 police, doctors and soldiers Wednesday continued their grim hunt for victims’ remains, cutting down trees and brush at the crash site, where only three bodies were found intact.

Seventy boxes of remains were flown by helicopter to a soccer field and adjacent civil guard barracks in Bilbao, where some 300 relatives viewed them, hoping to make identifications.

Nineteen victims have been identified, officials said. The U.S. Embassy in Madrid identified the three Americans killed as Timothy Edward Makey of San Francisco, Michelle Tote Tagano of New York and John Steigerwald of Fort Lee, N.J.