Turkish Plane Crashes Near Amsterdam Killing Nine People Aboard
A Turkish Airlines plane carrying 127 passengers and seven crew members crashed near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport while approaching the runway, killing nine people aboard and injuring more than 80, Dutch officials said.
“At 10:31 hours during its descent, flight TK 1951 arriving from Istanbul landed short of the runway during its approach,” Deputy Mayor Michel Bezuijen of the Dutch township of Haarlemmermeer said at a press conference today. He declined to comment on the cause of the crash, in which three crew members died. The bodies of the crew are still in the cockpit pending an investigation, Dutch public prosecutor Bob Steensma said at the press conference.
The Boeing 737-800 airliner that departed from Istanbul crashed in a meadow near Schiphol between a highway and a runway and broke into three pieces. Passengers were being treated near the crash site and about 20 ambulances were at the scene, Bob Oonk, who witnessed the accident, told RTL Television.
“The plane suddenly felt like it was falling into a ditch about nine minutes before landing and we were on the ground within five or six seconds,” Kerem Uzel, a passenger, told Turkish NTV news channel. “The tail of the plane hit the ground first and the plane dragged on the soil for a while. Then I saw an opening in the plane next to me and I got out, some other passengers also got out of the plane on their own.”
Ambulances and firefighters arrived and evacuated passengers, he said, taking seriously injured travelers away in ambulances and lightly injured ones into an airport building.
Six of the injured people are in a “critical state” and 25 passengers are severely wounded while another 24 have light injuries, Ineke van der Zande, a regional healthcare official involved in disasters, said at the press conference. The seriousness of the injuries of another 31 people that were transported to hospitals has yet to be determined, she added. A total of 86 people were transported by 60 ambulances to 11 hospitals in and around the region of Amsterdam, Van der Zande added.
The Dutch Safety Board dispatched five people to the site of the crash and will start an investigation, Fred Sanders, spokesman of The Hague-based Safety Board, said in a phone interview. The Washington-based National Transportation Safety Board is also sending a team, the board said in a statement.
The plane had the registration number TC-JGE, Ascend said. Boeing’s 737-800 model entered service in 1998 as the Chicago- based manufacturer introduced the so-called Next Generation of its best-selling plane. The type is powered by two CF56 engines from CFM International, a partnership of General Electric Co. and Safran SA of France.
