Scavengers target jet wreckage after crash

HUNDREDS of scavengers swarmed over the wreckage of a Peruvian airliner yesterday, potentially undermining the work of investigators en route to the crash that left at least 37 dead.

Dozens of soldiers stood by and watched as residents of an Amazon jungle town searched through the debris for anything of value.

“I’m collecting this for my house to hang my laundry,” said Rosario Dahua, 47, as she tugged at a tangle of heavy black wires next to a partially submerged turbine jet motor wedged in the water and mud.

Air force commander William Rodriguez, who is in charge of security at the site, said he did not believe the residents’ actions would impede the work of civil aviation investigators who have yet to arrive.

“We are verifying that all the bodies have really been recovered,” Cmdr Rodriguez said. “So if these people want to search for things, perhaps they’ll encounter another body.”

The TANS Airline Boeing 737-200 was carrying 98 people, including six crew members, on a domestic flight from the Peruvian capital of Lima to Pucallpa when it crash-landed on Tuesday in a marsh a few miles from the Pucallpa airport, killing at least 37 people, including four crew members.

At least 58 people survived the crash, the fifth this month, making August the deadliest month for world airline disasters in three years.

Among the survivors were six members of the Vivas family from Brooklyn, New York who recounted how, upon escaping the wreckage and fleeing into a hail storm, they rescued a baby boy in the mud.

“My uncle told us, ‘Let us pray’ and we were silent,” said Joshelyn Vivas, 15. “Hail was coming down on us and we went into like a cocoon around the baby.”

“We jumped out the plane and unfortunately we were thigh deep in the marsh water. It was just mud,” said the girl’s uncle, Gabriel Vivas, a 41-year-old manager of an electronics rental shop.

“We had to practically crawl out of there and try to get to some high ground,” he said.

“There was a baby that I saw behind the plane. I don’t know how the baby got there, but he was fine,” Gabriel Vivas said.

Joshelyn Vivas said the family didn’t know if the baby’s parents had survived the crash but were told he had been brought to Lima and was alive.

Gabriel Vivas said the captain had told the passengers to buckle their seat belts for landing when the plane made three sudden turbulent descents and crashed.

TANS airline said wind shear may have forced the pilot’s emergency landing.

Three missing people might include survivors from Pucallpa who returned to their homes after the crash without receiving medical assistance.

Television images of the crash site showed mutilated bodies being retrieved from a marsh near the Pucallpa airport where the pilot attempted an emergency landing. The fuselage was shattered and pieces strewn along a 500-metre path made by the plane as it crash-landed.

The Vivas family was seated in the rear of the aircraft, which, unlike the front, remained largely intact as it skidded across the marsh field. When it came to a stop, a flight attendant opened a rear door and urged passengers get out, the family said.

The pilot had begun his approach to the airport in torrential rains and strong winds, which passengers said began rocking the plane ten minutes before the scheduled landing.

But four miles from the airstrip he attempted to make an emergency landing, TANS said, after wind shear apparently pushed his plane close to the ground.

The pilot apparently aimed for the marsh to soften the impact, but the aircraft broke apart in the landing, strewing pieces of fuselage as it skidded over the boggy ground.

Airline officials have credited the pilot’s skill for saving so many lives.

But John Elliot, an experienced Peruvian pilot, and Victor Girao, a former president of Peru’s Association of Pilots, said that the crash appeared to be due to pilot error.

Mr Elliot said the pilot should have opted to avoid the storm and land at another airport.

Both said the pilot was flying too close to the ground while making the approach to the airport from four miles out, making it difficult to control the aircraft against wind shear.

“They were coming in very low, looking for the airstrip. A big beginners’ error,” Mr Girao said.

Search teams have recovered the plane’s cockpit flight data recorder, said Pablo Arevalo, a prosecutor in Pucallpa.

There were 18 foreigners aboard the aircraft - 11 Americans, four Italians, one Colombian, one Australian and one from Spain.

Among the dead were at least four foreigners - an American man and woman, a Spanish woman and a Colombian woman.

Airline accidents in Venezuela, Greece, Italy and Peru this month have killed 334 people.

The previous deadliest month was May 2002, with three major crashes that killed at least 485.