Dutch investigate fatal Turkish Airlines crash

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-02-26 21:18

Dutch authorities said there were 72 Turks and 32 Dutch citizens on board, as well as several other nationalities. Four American Boeing employees were also aboard, according to company spokesman Jim Proulx.

A video grab shows an aerial view of the site of the crashed Turkish Airlines passenger plane at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport February 25, 2009. [Agencies]

Families of Turkish victims arrived on a chartered flight from Istanbul late Wednesday.

Of the injured survivors, six were in critical condition, 25 were seriously hurt and 24 had slight injuries as of Thursday morning, Stenacker said.

A retired pilot who listened to a radio exchange between air traffic controllers and the aircraft shortly before the crash said he didn't hear anything unusual.

"Everything appeared normal," said Joe Mazzone, a former Delta Air Lines captain. "They were given clearance to descend to 7,000 feet."

Just before the end of the 52-second recording, the last thing heard is the controllers giving the tower frequency to the pilots and instructing them to get clearance to land, said Mazzone, who lives in Auburn, Alabama. The pilots acknowledged the instruction.

There was no way to tell from the Web recording if there was more communication between the aircraft and the officials at the airport or exactly how long the exchange came prior to the crash. Mazzone said the point where the transmission ended would likely have been two to four minutes before the plane would have normally landed.

Sanders said the exchange was part of the investigation.

Weather at the airport at the time was cloudy with a slight drizzle.

Turkish Airlines chief Temel Kotil said the captain, Hasan Tahsin, was an experienced former air force pilot. Turkish officials said the plane was built in 2002 and last underwent thorough maintenance on Dec. 22.

It was the deadliest crash in the Netherlands since a vintage DC3 crashed in a shallow sea on Sept. 25, 1996, killing 32 people. The country's worst crash came on Oct. 4, 1992, when an El Al cargo Boeing 747 slammed into an apartment block near Schiphol killing 43 people.

Turkish Airlines has had several serious crashes since 1974, when 360 people died in the crash of a DC-10 near Paris after a cargo door came off. More recently, in 2003, 75 died when an RJ-100 missed the runway in heavy fog in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir.

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