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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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EUROPE, Page 50Death from the Sky
Investigators search for clues in the crash of an El Al 747
that devastated an apartment complex and killed at least 51
By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/AMSTERDAM
Who was to blame? The question ricocheted around the
globe. From Amsterdam, where the charred remains of victims were
being shoveled out of smoldering rubble. To Tel Aviv, where El
Al Airlines fielded inquiries about its plane's safety record.
To Seattle, where the Boeing Co. called on carriers worldwide to
inspect the engine mountings of 551 747 jets. To Taiwan, where
divers searched the ocean floor for fresh clues to the cause of
a mysterious -- and perhaps similar -- crash last December.
The darkest fears of all those who live in the flight
paths of airports were realized on the quiet evening of Oct. 4,
when an El Al 747-200F cargo crashed into a 10-story low-income
apartment building in southeast Amsterdam. Laden with fuel and
114 tons of commercial cargo, the freighter had taken off from
Schiphol Airport at 6:22 p.m., headed for Tel Aviv. Six minutes
later, veteran pilot Isaac Fuchs issued a distress call,
reporting a fire in a right-wing engine. As he circled back for
the airport, dumping fuel in preparation for an emergency
landing, he radioed that a second engine had failed. "Going
down! Going down!" Fuchs' words, monitored by the control tower,
had a chilling simplicity. Seconds later, the giant plane
slammed into the apartment building, sundering it in two. Three
minutes' grace, and the jet would have reached the closest
runway 10 miles away.
Within hours, in a cold rain, 800 firemen and policemen
were searching the blackened ruins in shifts. "It's hard to
keep our eyes dry," said fire fighter Gerard Jurgens. "We find
children's toys almost intact, and then suddenly we discover a
part of what was a human being -- what can I say?" Workers found
the remains of 51 victims, but many others were incinerated in
the fiery explosion. The final toll will probably never be
known. Many illegal immigrants resided in the complex, and
chances are that relatives and friends of the victims may not
report them missing for fear of being deported themselves at a
time when hostility toward immigrants is on the rise in
Holland. Along with Fuchs, the first officer, the flight
engineer, and the plane's only passenger, the wife of an El Al
security officer, died in the crash.
As 40 investigators from Holland, Israel and the U.S.
examined what was left of the 13-year-old aircraft, mostly
twisted metal shards, shock gave way to question upon question.
Some answers may come from the badly damaged flight-data
recorder, which searchers unearthed in the rubble and dispatched
for analysis, first to Britain, then to the U.S.
In the absence of definitive answers, the Dutch were left
with the unforgettable horror. As a cold wind whipped through
the weeping willows that surround the apartment complex,
Wynanda Pont, a native of Suriname, gazed at the gutted, burned
hulk of a building where scorched laundry still hung from
clotheslines and window boxes held a few lone geraniums. The
37-year-old teacher had been crocheting by her window across the
street when she heard a crash and saw a wall of red flame. "I
rushed outside," she recalled. "I can still hear the screaming.
I saw a woman throw two children from a balcony, but they fell
into the flames, and then she jumped in after them."
If the tragedy seemed especially shocking, it may be
because its victims were so unsuspecting. Many were watching a
soccer match on television; others were sitting down to an
evening meal. Unlike the 167 people who died last month when a
Pakistan International Airlines Airbus crashed in Nepal, the
victims in Amsterdam had made no decision to assume the risks
of flying. They simply happened to live near a busy airport.