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Airline: Wind shear may have doomed Peru jet
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QUICKVOTEYOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- Authorities believe a plane crash in Peru that killed at least 31 passengers was possibly caused by a sudden change in wind speed or direction, a phenomenon known as wind shear, according to the airline. Tuesday's crash of the TANS airline on a jungle highway near the remote Pucallpa airport was the fifth major airline accident this month. TANS airline said 57 of the 98 aboard the plane survived and 10 people are unaccounted for. Authorities said they have recovered the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder and will send them to aviation officials in Washington, D.C., to be analyzed. They believe the plane went down near Pucallpa's airport as a result of wind shear, or heavy crosswinds. Passenger Jose Vivas, who lives in New York state, said there was no warning before the plane went down. "After we crash, [a flight attendant] opened back door quickly and she tell us to 'Get out, get out, get away from the plane,''" he told CNN in accented English. (Watch survivor's account) Vivas said he and his brother pushed his three daughters and his sister-in-law out of the door, and ran to safety -- stopping briefly to help a small child on the way. (Full story) Jeffrey Young of Fayetteville, Georgia, told CNN his wife, Sherra, and his son-in-law, Steve Lotti, were on the flight and he was trying to find out if they were among the survivors. The TANS plane, a 22-year-old Boeing 737, was headed to Pucallpa from Lima. Emergency landingThe airline said the pilot, who reported no mechanical problems, was apparently trying to make an emergency landing in stormy weather. The pilot had talked to the control tower as he approached the runway, and did not report any mechanical failures, officials said. "The plane did not crash. It did not fall. The plane made an emergency landing," said TANS spokesman Jorge Belevan, adding that it did not appear the crash was caused by a technical failure. "The preliminary information we have is that the accident could have been caused by wind shear," he said. The pilot tried to land in a marsh to soften the impact but the landing split the aircraft in two, Edwin Vasquez, president of the Ucayali region, told The Associated Press. AP quoted officials and radio reports who indicated the pilot was trying to land on a roadway. Airline spokesman Jorge Belevan said that among those aboard were 11 Americans, two Italians, one Spaniard, one Colombian and one Australian. Three of the passengers were children, he said. Of the 11 Americans, at least six survived -- all members of the Vivas family -- and two were killed, airlines officials said. Recovery efforts resumed Wednesday at the site of the crash, about 3 kilometers from the airport's runway. Video of the aftermath showed recovery workers removing several bodies from the marshy site. Some survivors said they escaped the burning wreckage in a hailstorm and waded through mud to flee. "There were people who walked away from the crash uninjured," he said. "It's not very clear how many," Police Lt. David Mori told AP. Airline spokesman Jorge Belevan said the Boeing 737, which left Lima with six crew members and 92 passengers, went down at 3:06 p.m. (2006 GMT) -- 10 minutes before it was to arrive at the airport. The flight takes about an hour. According to reports, the plane circled the airport until attempting to make the emergency landing. A man identifying himself as William Zea, a passenger on the plane, told CPN radio that the plane "suffered some malfunction and we went down," AP reports. Tomas Ruiz, another passenger, told Radioprogramas: "It seems it was a matter of the weather. Ten minutes before we were to land in Pucallpa the plane began to shake a lot." Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo appeared on national television Tuesday to urge citizens to show "courage and solidarity with those involved" and affected by the crash. A plane was due to bring medical and other supplies Wednesday to the accident scene to aid rescue efforts. Another TANS plane was due to carry family members to the area, the airline said. Pucallpa is a city of more than 150,000 people on the Ucayali River in eastern Peru, located in the Amazon rainforest about 480 kilometers (300 miles) northeast of Lima, the capital. Authorities said they are also looking into survivors' accounts that there was smoke from a fire in the jungle that may have decreased visibility. In January 2003, a TANS airline crashed in Peru's northern jungle, killing more than 40 people. Deadly monthThe accident followed four other airliner crashes this month. (Full story) Last week, 160 passengers and crew died when a West Caribbean Airways MD-80 aircraft went down in Venezuela. Two days earlier, 121 people died when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing crashed into mountains near Athens. Sixteen people were believed to have died on August 6 when a Tunisian Tuninter plane crashed off Sicily. And on August 2, all 309 people survived when an Air France Airbus A340 overshot the runway in Toronto. CNN's Claudia Cisneros contributed to this report. Copyright 2005 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report. 
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