Romanian Plane Crashes in Italy; 49 Aboard Die
A Romanian turboprop airliner crashed in snowy, windy weather Wednesday night while taking off in northern Italy, killing all 49 people on board.
The plane, bound for Timisoara, Romania, went down less than a mile beyond the end of the runway at Villafranca airport, just outside Verona, firefighters said.
The plane was owned by the charter company Banat Air, which had established the route for Italians doing business in Romania.
Blackened wreckage lay strewn across several hundred yards at the site of the crash in a vineyard. A piece of the plane’s tail could be seen. Coffins were lined up nearby, covered in plastic sheeting.
The plane’s fuel burned amid the debris, and bad weather was hampering efforts to extinguish it.
Thirty-four of the passengers were Italian, said Lucio Parenti, a government official in Verona. He said the rest were from the former Yugoslav federation and the Netherlands. The crew was Romanian.
It was the second major crash of a Romanian airliner this year. On March 31, a Tarom Airlines jet bound for Brussels went down shortly after taking off from Bucharest’s Otopeni airport. All 60 people aboard were killed.
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