AeroCarribbean Flight 883 was traveling from Santiango de Cuba to the nation’s capital when the pilot called in an emergency. When the emergency call arrived it was roughly 5:42 p.m. Then, the air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane. The plane reportedly went down near the village of Guasimal. There were 61 total passengers and a crew of seven on board.
“A ball of flame”
According to a witness on the ground the plane had become a “ball of flame” as it plummeted from the sky and crashed into the mountains near the village. The Cuban Civil Aviation Authority later released a statement that there appeared to be no survivors aboard the flight. A list of names of passengers on that flight were posted on a website of a government-run newspaper Juventud Rebelde.
With a death toll of 68 the crash would be the worst since 1989. The second words occurred on September 3, 1989. At that time a Soviet-made Ilyushin-62M plane crashed just after take off. On that plane 126 people died.
Bulldozers were reportedly at the scene of the crash from Thursday and had cleared a path to the wreckage. Authorities were reporting that they had begun to remove bodies. An officially released photo of the crash site showed a large segment of the airplane still engulfed in flames.
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