Jet Crashes in Venezuela, Killing All 160 Onboard

A chartered jet carrying French Caribbean islanders home from a Panama vacation crashed in rural Venezuela early Tuesday, minutes after the pilot reported trouble with both engines. All 160 people aboard died.

The Colombian-owned West Caribbean Airways MD-82 was en route in the predawn hours to the French territory of Martinique when the pilot radioed for permission to make an emergency landing in Maracaibo, 315 miles west of Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, authorities said. The jet went down in a remote cattle-ranching area just across the border from Colombia, about 70 miles short of Maracaibo’s airport.

Search and rescue workers reached the crash site before daybreak but found no survivors. Col. Francisco Paz, head of the National Civil Aviation Institute, calculated from radio communications between the pilot and Caracas’ main airport that the plane fell 7,000 feet in one minute after its second engine failed.

Most of the 152 passengers were French civil servants returning from a weeklong trip. All eight crew members were Colombian citizens, the airline said.

In Paris, French President Jacques Chirac offered condolences to the families of victims. “France is mourning,” he said in a televised statement.

Anguished relatives were gathered at the City Hall in Ducos, the nearest town to the Martinique capital’s airport. Associated Press reported from the island that they broke down in tears as a local legislator read out the names on the passenger list.

Chirac established a crisis center at the Foreign Ministry to coordinate with Venezuelan authorities and dispatched the minister for overseas territories, Francois Baroin, to Martinique to assist with the return of remains. He said he planned to call Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “to ask him to do everything so that the circumstances of the tragedy are made clear as soon as possible.”

It was the second crash of a West Caribbean Airways plane in five months. In March, a twin-engine turboprop crashed during takeoff from the Colombian island of Old Providence, killing eight and injuring six. At that airport, authorities suspended all West Caribbean Airways service without explanation shortly after Tuesday’s crash.

French Transportation Minister Dominique Perben said at a news conference that the plane that crashed Tuesday had been inspected twice since May and no problems were reported by maintenance crews.

The plane’s previous flight, though, took off four hours late because of mechanical difficulties, Colombia’s RCN television reported. In addition, an official of the Medellin-based airline disclosed after the accident that the plane had lost a piece of its tail assembly during a flight last month. But it landed without incident or even the cockpit crew’s knowledge that anything was amiss, and it was repaired.

About two hours into Tuesday’s flight from Panama City, at 3:07 a.m., the pilot, Omar Ospina, contacted the flight-control center at Maiquetia airport, near Caracas, reporting that one engine was down and requesting to lower his altitude to 31,000 feet, said Delfin Garcia, an official with Venezuela’s search and rescue division. Eight minutes later, Ospina radioed Maiquetia to report trouble with the second engine. He said he was down to 14,000 feet and wanted to land at Maracaibo airport. The control tower then lost the plane from radar screens, Garcia said.

“From the conversation between the control tower and the pilot, mechanical failure apparently caused the fall of the plane,” Venezuelan Interior Minister Jesse Chacon said.

Chacon confirmed that the flight data recorder had been recovered. He said that the impact was at “high velocity” and that debris was spread over a wide area. Many bodies were burned beyond recognition, he said.

Authorities were believed to be looking into possible fuel contamination as a cause of the crash.

The tragedy united authorities and diplomats across sometimes-thorny political divides. While Venezuelan investigators are supervising the inquiry, Colombia, Panama, France and the United States were sending crash investigators to assist, Garcia said.

Only a week ago, Chavez accused U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials of spying in his country, triggering retaliatory expulsions and visa denials. Caracas also has had diplomatic frictions with Bogota over alleged aid to Colombian rebels and with Panama after last year’s pardoning of a Venezuelan fugitive accused of blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976.

The crash occurred near the town of Machiques, about 20 miles east of the Colombian border in a sparsely populated area.

Venezuelan television showed rescuers in masks examining the crash scene, although only the plane’s tail could be seen. Under new media rules, broadcasters can face fines or license revocation for transmitting images deemed by a government panel to be upsetting. Privately owned Globovision showed footage of national guard troops blocking journalists from the crash site.

Times special correspondent Gould reported from Caracas and staff writer Williams from Miami.