Airliner Crashes in Fog; 20 Killed

A twin-engine plane smashed into a field in thick fog Wednesday near Luxembourg’s international airport and burst into flames, killing 20 of the 22 people aboard. The pilot and a passenger survived.

The Luxair Fokker 50, carrying 19 passengers and three crew members on a flight from Berlin, crashed about three miles from the airport while preparing to land. The field is only a few hundred yards from a residential area.

The passenger who survived the crash and the fire that engulfed the wreckage only fractured his hand, government spokesman Guy Schuller said.

“They are quite light injuries,” he said. He declined to identify the passenger.

The pilot, a Luxembourger, was badly injured after being trapped in the cockpit, but Schuller said his life was not in danger.

Investigators were trying to pin down the cause of the crash, the first in Luxair’s 40-year history, airline Chief Executive Christian Heinzmann said.

“Everything was normal,” Luxembourg Transportation Minister Henri Grethen said. “What we know is that the pilot did not signal any danger.”

Rescue workers managed to pull five survivors from the wreckage and rush them to a hospital, but three died of their injuries. Fifteen of those on board were German, two were French and five were from Luxembourg, a tiny nation of 380,000 shoehorned between Germany, Belgium and France.