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More Than 100 Die as Aging Cuban Airliner Crashes

May 19, 2018 Admin Top News 0

“The news is not very hopeful,” Mr. Díaz-Canel told Cuban state television.

Cubana de Aviación has struggled to overcome a reputation for poor safety after a string of crashes left dozens of people dead in the late 1990s.

In 1997, a Cubana flight crashed off the island’s southeast coast three minutes after takeoff, killing about 40 people.

A year later, around 80 people were killed when a Cubana plane crashed into a field after taking off from the airport in Quito, Ecuador.

In December 1999, dozens of people, many of them Guatemalan medical students, died when a Cubana flight skidded off the runway in Guatemala City. A week after that, another Cubana flight crashed into a mountain in Venezuela, killing all 22 people aboard.

In the initial shroud of confusion over Friday’s crash, there were conflicting reports over which company owned the plane leased to Cubana.

State media reports first said it belonged to Blue Panorama, an Italian company, but Damojh Airlines, a Mexican company also known as Global Air, later confirmed that it was the owner.

Damojh Airlines began operations in 1990 and has only three airplanes in its fleet, according to a statement from the Mexican Secretary of Transportation.

The statement said that as recently as November, the aircraft had been inspected as part of an annual program, and that its planes had passed a safety test administered by the government agency. In addition, the airline was up-to-date on its permits and was authorized to lease the planes domestically and abroad, including to Cubana.

It remained unclear what caused the crash, but it came against the backdrop of Cuba’s struggle to improve commercial aviation on the island, which has long faced economic constraints from the United States embargo.

A day before the crash, Cuban state newspapers reported that one of the country’s new vice presidents, Salvador Valdés Mesa, met with key officials from the island’s aviation sector to discuss challenges.

The report said that Roberto Peña Samper, the president of the Cuban Aviation Corporation, bemoaned that the “embargo placed by successive American administrations prevents” the island “from acquiring the resources necessary to operate a larger fleet of planes and to enhance airport services.”

Cubana suspended most domestic flights in March, several news outlets reported. Radio Marti, the United States government-funded website, posted a photo of a sign on the airline’s door showing that all the flights had been canceled.

A security guard told Radio Marti that there were “literally no planes,” and added that the ones that remain are “in very bad condition.”