Family Was Heading for Disneyland : Pilot’s Wife, Sons Among Mexico Crash Dead

Among the 166 people killed in Monday’s fiery crash of a Mexicana Airlines Boeing 727 were the pilot’s two young sons and his wife--a former Mexicana flight attendant who had flown thousands of miles and survived a 1969 plane crash.

An airline spokesman said Tuesday that the family had been heading for a delayed Easter vacation at Disneyland.

The jetliner, which slammed into a mountainside less than 30 minutes after taking off from Mexico City en route to the Mexican Pacific resorts of Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan and on to Los Angeles, also had nine Americans aboard, although no positive identifications have been made, a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Mexico City said.

Believed booked on the flight were Christine Pittner and Tracy Bates, two teen-agers from suburban Buffalo, N.Y.; lawyer Robert B. Loeb, and junior high schoolteacher Debra Roth, both from Cleveland, relatives and friends said. No other names have been released.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Vincent Hovanec in Mexico City, who confirmed the count, reported that U.S. officials at the crash site “said that many of the bodies are badly burned and dismembered and scattered over a wide area.”

Canadians, French Aboard

Also aboard the plane, which carried 158 passengers and eight crew members, were three Canadians--Robert Kelly of Vancouver, Pat Paul, hometown unknown, and a third who was not identified; at least nine French nationals, and four Swedes--Swedish Embassy counselor Kerstin Enerfelt, her two children and her sister.

The cause of the crash--the worst in Mexican aviation history--was still a mystery, although the flight data recorder has been recovered.

Enrique Mendez Fernandez, director of Mexico’s Civil Aeronautics Agency, said the possible cause of the crash would not be determined for at least a month. Mexicana officials, however, said the pilot reported pressurization problems and sought permission to descend shortly before the plane crashed. A team of aviation experts from the United States put together by the National Transportation Safety Board was sent to assist in the investigation.

An airline spokesman said the flight’s captain, Carlos Guadarrama, was one of Mexico’s most experienced pilots, with 15,000 flight hours logged, a fact that has led airline officials to tend toward ruling out human error as a cause of the crash.

Taking a Few Days Off

The spokesman added that Guadarrama was taking a few days off between flights to take his family on a California vacation. He had obtained special cockpit passes for his sons, Rodolfo, 10, and Juan, 8, and his wife, Graciela, a former flight attendant who walked away unscathed from a 1969 Mexicana plane crash near the Mexico City airport in which 27 people were killed.

By Tuesday night, rescue workers had recovered all of the bodies from the shattered wreckage along the red, dusty slopes of the Sierra Madre about 80 miles northwest of the capital.

Officials said the tail section of the jet, with about 20 bodies inside, fell on one side of the hill near the peak, while the main fuselage section plunged down a 400-foot crevice, strewing shards of metal, pieces of broken seats and parts of bodies across a wide area.

About 300 soldiers stationed in the nearby towns of Toluca and Morelia were called in to assist roughly 200 Red Cross and airline workers in the search. Many of the workers labored without shirts in the hot weather and wore bandannas around their faces to protect themselves from the clouds of dust.

In the wreckage, a woman’s body lay with her hand outstretched. Nearby was a woman’s wallet opened to the photographs of four small children.

Carried Down Mountain

As bodies were found, attempts were made to identify them from any documents on them or nearby. The bodies were placed in plastic bags on a stretcher and carried five miles down the mountain to helicopters that ferried them to makeshift identification centers.

Witnesses said the plane had exploded and burst into flames before it hit the 7,792-foot peak, known as El Carbon.

Ignacio Carrillo, who has a small farm outside the nearby hamlet of Pomoca, said, “I heard two booms like thunder, one up and one down. I and some others, we climbed up the mountain and we were able to see only pieces of plane and a few dead thrown around here and there.”

Angel Bolanos, 43, with his horse loaded with fodder for his seven cows, said, “It fell burning. While it was flying, part of the plane came loose and fell and the other part also fell. When it fell it sounded like thunder, and when it broke it sounded like thunder. The part that fell caught fire, and it was like a volcano.”