HAARLEMMERLIEDE, Netherlands — A Turkish Airlines jetliner plummeted out of the mist and plowed into a muddy field Wednesday near Amsterdam’s main airport, but nearly everyone on board — 125 people — survived. The nine dead included both pilots.
The Boeing 737-800 was en route from Istanbul to Amsterdam carrying 134 people when it suddenly lost speed and fell out of the sky about two miles short of the runway at Schiphol Airport, investigators said.
Four Boeing employees traveling on business were aboard the plane, according to Jim Proulx, a spokesman for the company. All four are based in the Seattle area, he said, but he would not provide further details until their families had been notified.
He said Boeing was sending a team to provide technical assistance to Dutch safety officials as they investigate. The plane’s flight data recorders were recovered and were to be analyzed by experts.
The jetliner broke into three pieces upon impact: the fuselage tore in two near the cockpit and the tail was ripped off. Despite the catastrophic impact, the wreckage did not burn and scores of people walked away.
Survivor Huseyin Sumer said he crawled to safety out of a crack in the fuselage.
“We were about to land, we could not understand what was happening, some passengers screamed in panic, but it happened so fast,” Sumer said on Turkish NTV, adding that the crash was over in 5 to 10 seconds.
Another survivor, Jihad Alariachi, said there was no warning from the cockpit to brace for landing before the ground loomed up through the mist and drizzle.
“We braked really hard, but that’s normal in a landing. And then the nose went up. And then we bounced … with the nose aloft,” she said, adding that she and her sister scrambled out an emergency exit.
More than 50 people were injured, about half of them seriously.
Authorities said the toll could have been far higher if the plane had not gone down in mud, which lessened the impact and helped avert a fire from breaking out in the ruptured fuel tanks and lines on the underside of the fuselage.
In addition, having reached its destination, the plane would have used up most of its fuel, lessening the chances of a fuel-driven fire. Authorities would not say whether the plane sent out a distress call before the crash.
The head of the Dutch Safety Authority, Pieter van Vollenhoven, said the plane appeared to have lost speed before crashing.
“You see that because of a lack of speed it literally fell out of the sky,” he told NOS radio after visiting the crash site.
Experts say crashes involving modern airliners are more survivable due to engineering advances that have resulted in strengthened structures and fire retardant technologies used for cabin seats and furnishings, as well as better emergency training of cockpit and cabin crews.
Six of the injured were in critical condition, 25 were seriously hurt and 24 had slight injuries, health authorities said. Survivors were taken to 11 hospitals including an emergency field hospital set up by the military in the central city of Utrecht.
Investigators will explore a wide range of possible causes, ranging from weather-related factors to insufficient fuel or loss, navigational errors, pilot fatigue or bird strikes. Experts say initial results could be made public soon because of the sophistication of the Boeing 737-800s black box, although the full report will likely not be ready before the end of the year.
Weather at the airport at the time of the crash was cloudy with a slight drizzle.
Boeing’s 737 is the world’s best-selling commercial jet, with more than 6,000 orders since the model was launched in 1965.
The 737-800, a recent version of the plane, has a “very good safety record,” said William Voss, president of the independent Flight Safety Foundation based in Alexandria, Va.
“It has been involved in a couple of accidents, but nothing that relates directly back to the aircraft.”
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