MADRID, Spain — A gauge indicating that overheated air was entering a Spanair jetliner forced pilots to abandon a takeoff about an hour before the plane crashed in flames, but airline officials refused to speculate Thursday on the cause of the accident that killed 153 people.
As investigators tried to piece together what happened, relatives crushed by grief went to a makeshift morgue to identify loved ones. Officials said many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.
One survivor told of the heaving, hellish final minutes of the MD-82’s flight, saying she feared she was going to die.
“The plane was rocking back and forth, until I suspected it was going to fall,” Ligia Palomino, a 41-year-old emergency rescue worker who happened to be on board, told Spain’s Cadena Ser radio station. “I saw people, smoke, explosions. I think that is what woke me up because I had lost consciousness.”
“I thought that if help did not arrive soon I would die,” said Palomino, who suffered leg injuries and a broken rib.
A video of the scene broadcast by Spanish national television TVE showed wreckage strewn across a wide area, with plastic covering what appeared to be victims’ remains.
Many of the victims in Wednesday’s flight were families traveling to the Canary Islands, a Spanish beach resort off Africa’s West Coast. Compounding the tragedy was news that at least 22 of those on board were children, including two infants. Only three youngsters were believed to be among the 19 survivors.
Development Minister Magdalena Alvarez said 39 bodies have been identified, and that the process could take days because forensic teams were using DNA to help make identifications.
Some mourners spent the night at the morgue, set up at Madrid’s main convention center — the same facility used for bodies after the March 11, 2004 Islamic terror attacks that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.
One day after the crash, Spanair gave new information about the plane’s initial attempt to take off. Spokesman Javier Mendoza said an air intake gauge under the cockpit had detected overheating while the jetliner was taxiing, causing the plane to turn back. Technicians corrected the problem by essentially turning the gauge off.
Mendoza said the device is not on a checklist of equipment that has to be functional for a plane to depart, and that turning off such a device is an accepted procedure. The plane was eventually cleared by technicians, but crashed on its second attempt to take off, burning and breaking into pieces.
The company said it did not know if the gauge problem had anything to do with the accident, but two aviation experts said it was not likely that such a seemingly minor problem could bring down a modern plane.
Alvaro Gammicchia, a pilot for the Spanish airline Iberia who has flown MD-82’s for seven years, said that even without the gauge “the plane would not fail to the point of causing a tragedy.”
The MD-80 series aircraft have a number of static ports or pitot tubes — tiny holes — near the nose of the aircraft, with different functions. They provide data on air speed, air pressure, and outside temperature to the cockpit instruments. If the pitot tube or the static ports were somehow physically blocked, cockpit instruments such as the airspeed and climb indicators would be unable to function because they would not be receiving outside data.
In contrast, probes for the engine instruments are located around the engines themselves.
Patrick Smith, a U.S.-based MD-80 pilot and aviation author, said that the gauge — also known as a probe — was not likely to have been involved.
“Most likely, whatever the malfunction of the probe was, it is probably not related to what happened,” he said.
As investigators headed for the crash scene — including a team from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and representatives of airplane manufacturer Boeing — attention was focusing on the plane’s two black box recorders, which might provide further clues into the accident. Mendoza, the Spanair spokesman, said both had been recovered, but one had been damaged.
Boeing merged with the maker of the MD-80 jets, McDonnell-Douglas, in 1997. The MD-80 jets were manufactured until 1999.
The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported that one of the two engines failed and may have caught fire during takeoff. The newspaper La Vanguardia said witnesses saw the plane’s left engine explode and catch fire before the aircraft went down.
Before departure, pilots in multiengine planes calculate the velocity at which they can safely abort a takeoff in an emergency — given the size of the runway they are using — and the speed at which they can get airborne, even if one engine fails.
Safety regulations require runways to be long enough for aborted takeoffs, and runway 36L at Barajas airport is one of the world’s longest commercial runways.
It’s likely that a combination of factors caused Wednesday’s crash, Smith said.
“It’s possible that a catastrophic engine failure — such as an explosion or fragmentation of internal parts — could have affected hydraulics, flight controls, etc.,” he said.
“You’re making the transition from ground to flight, and an aircraft is at that point inherently more susceptible to an incident or accident, should something go seriously wrong,” he said.
If that happened in Madrid on Wednesday, the Spanair MD-82 simply may have been beyond the pilots’ control, Smith said.
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