Over 80 killed as Thai jet crashes
Eighty-eight people died, many of them European tourists, when a budget airliner carrying 130 passengers and crew crash-landed in bad weather at Phuket airport in Thailand yesterday. At least eight British holidaymakers were among the 42 survivors, many of whom were hospitalised with burns. A hospital official said at least five of the survivors were seriously hurt.
The deputy governor of Phuket island, Worapot Ratthaseema, said the dead included Irish, Israeli, Australian and British passengers. It was not immediately clear how many foreigners died, he said. An Airports of Thailand spokeswoman, Monrudee Gettuphan, said 78 foreigners had been on board.
Passengers described how they scrambled over burning bodies in the panic to get out of the cabin. The McDonnell Douglas MD-82, operated by the Thai airline One-Two-Go, was on a scheduled 80-minute trip from Bangkok to the holiday resort. It came down in heavy rain and cross winds, skidded on the runway, broke in two and burst into flames. Chaisak Angsuwan, director general of the Thai air transport authority, said: the weather played a part in the crash. “The visibility was poor as the pilot attempted to land. He decided to make a go-around, but the plane lost balance and crashed,”
A slightly burned passenger, Parinwit Chusaeng, told the national television channel TITV: “I saw passengers engulfed in fire as I stepped over them on the way out of the plane. I was afraid the plane was going to explode, so I ran away.”
Other survivors and witnesses confirmed the pilot’s difficulty in landing. An Irishman named Sean, who was being treated for burns to his arms, legs and back, said it was clear there was a problem before the attempt to land. “You could tell there was a problem. The plane was flying around trying to land.”
Nong Khaonual, a Thai who survived the crash with his wife, said he believed the plane had descended too quickly. “The airplane was landing in heavy rain. It landed too fast. I have never seen anything like this. It descended very fast. Just before we touched the runway we felt the plane try to lift up and it skidded off the runway,” he said. “My wife was half conscious and I dragged her out of the emergency exit. There was a man behind us and he was on fire.”
A witness on the ground, William Harding, said: “What it looked like to me was that it actually landed and then crashed, maybe skidded off the runway. The inside was totally on fire and [after] about five minutes there was a small explosion that blew off the top of the plane.”
Jikarat Wongtawan, a worker at the Bangkok Phuket hospital, said 32 passengers were being treated there, 24 of them foreigners. They included eight Britons, five Germans, five Iranians, two Israelis and at least one Australian, Irish and Canadian. Other injured foreigners were taken to the Phuket International hospital.
The Foreign Office in London said last night that the British ambassador to Thailand was on his way to the resort. The resort describes itself as “Asia’s most popular beach destination”.
Udom Tantiprasongchai, managing director of Orient Thai Airlines which owns One-Two-Go Airlines, told TITV: “This is the first accident in more than a decade that we have been operating and we are shocked.” The crash is the country’s deadliest aviation accident since December 1998, when 101 people were killed after a Thai Airways jet crashed while trying to land in heavy rain at Surat Thani, 330 miles south of Bangkok. Forty-five people survived.
