Avianca jet crashes near Kennedy airport
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This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from January 1990.
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Avianca Flight 52, a Boeing 707, was carrying 158 people, including the crew, when it crashed in fog and rain Thursday night on its second approach to land at New York City's Kennedy International Airport.
Scores of passengers were injured and some who survived the initial crash died at the scene before they could be transported to a hospital. The Rev. Daniel Ahern of St. Pius V Roman Catholic Church in nearby Oyster Bay said he gave several their last rites.
"I gave them rosaries and said little prayers," the priest said. "They were crying and asking about their family members."
The 23-year-old jetliner, coming in from Bogota after a stop in Medellin, Colombia, broke into at least three pieces. Witnesses saw no fire or explosion, and rescuers arrived to find passengers scrambling out of windows.
Chuck DeGaetano of the New York City Emergency Medical Service put the death toll in the "high 50s."
By early Friday, 92 people had been taken to hospitals, according to Sgt. James Callahan of the Nassau County Police Emergency Medical Bureau.
Nassau County Police spokesman Officer Peter Franzone said at least 78 people survived the crash. Among those hospitalised were 15 children, many carried from the crash scene crying.
Kennedy's control tower lost contact with Flight 52 at 9:34 p.m. (0234 GMT Friday) when the plane was about 15 miles (24 kilometres) northeast of the airport after a five-hour flight, said Port Authority Police Officer Phil Montouri.
He said "there was no radio communication at all to the tower. It just went down."
The plane had missed one approach to land at Kennedy and gone around a second time, according to Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The crash occurred just off Oyster Bay Harbour in an exclusive Nassau County hamlet on the north shore of Long Island, about 35 miles (56 kilometres) northeast of central New York City. The crash site was near the old home of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, which now is a national historic site.
Rescuers laid ladders up the steep wooded hillside, where part of the fuselage came to rest, then passed the survivors down.
"The fuselage was cracked open near the top of the plane. That's how we got access to the survivors," said firefighter Tom Czajkowski. "You could hear people crying and screaming.
"A lot of passengers were dead and a lot were in shock. Some of them were talking to us -- we told them to hang in there, we'd get them out." Alfred Williams, an off-duty New York policeman, said one passenger told him that the plane's engines went dead and the aircraft crashed soon after.
Anxious relatives waiting at the airport watched television news pictures of the crash. Cecilia Battista, U.S. personnel manager for Avianca, said the plane carried 158 people -- 149 passengers, including seven children, and nine crew members. She had little other information, but identified the captain as Laureano Caviedes.
Dr. George Dunn of Glen Cove Community Hospital said when he first arrived he thought "it was going to be a body count. I didn't expect many survivors." But he said there were a lot of survivors because the airplane didn't catch on fire.
On 27 Nov., an Avianca Boeing 727 was bombed out of the sky minutes after takeoff from Bogota on a domestic flight to Cali. The explosion killed all 107 people on board. The Extraditables, a group of drug traffickers fearing extradition to the United States, claimed responsibility for the bombing in a phone call to the Colombian radio network Caracol.
