Tales from victims' relatives and survivors | Spanair defends troubled takeoff | Chaos at airline | Airline's troubled history | What went wrong? | Full passenger list

Angry relatives of Madrid crash victims asked yesterday why the aircraft was allowed to fly two hours after it aborted a take-off because of a technical fault.

A total of 153 people died on Wednesday when the Spanair aircraft bound for the Canary Islands failed to take off, crashing shortly beyond the runway and bursting into flames. Nineteen people were injured.

Spanair officials confirmed that the pilot aborted his first take-off attempt after noticing that an air intake under the cockpit window was overheating. Javier Mendoza, the airline’s deputy managing director, said that the problem was treated and corrected by maintenance personnel, who switched off power to the intake – standard procedure for the McDonnell Douglas MD82 aircraft.

His explanation did little to quell the anger of relatives who gathered at a makeshift mortuary in a convention centre to identify the bodies.

One survivor, Ligia Palomino, said: “The plane was wobbling from one side to another. I don’t know what happened next. I was in a sort of river and saw people, smoke, explosions.”

An air hostess in an Iberia aircraft that was coming into land heard her captain exclaim: “That plane is not taking off. It’s eating up the runway!” She said the Spanair aircraft’s left engine exploded when it was about 70 metres in the air and fell “like a leaf”.

She said: “As it swerved, its left wing touched the ground, there was an explosion and the plane broke apart.”

A Spanish pilots’ union claimed that Spanair, which is cutting jobs, was asking pilots to carry out repair work because of a shortage of maintenance personnel. Spanair, a subsidiary of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), rebuffed the criticism, insisting that the company had an exemplary safety record. Swedish media also reported that there were 166 passengers on the flight list even though SAS’s annual report says that the maximum number of seats is 150. SAS said it was normal to put extra seats on aircraft and that this had nothing to do with safety.

There were also reports yesterday that the 15-year-old aircraft was due to be retired from service later this year.

One theory is that thrust reversers, normally used only at touchdown, were deployed. That would explain why the pilots were unable to control the craft despite reaching normal take-off speed. In 1991, a Boeing 767 crashed in Thailand with the loss of 223 lives when the thrust reverser went into operation automatically.

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power
• White House gatecrashers got to the president