CUKUROREN, Turkey (AFP) — A plane operated by a budget airline crashed Friday in mountains in southwest Turkey after apparently veering off course, killing all 57 people on board, officials said.
It was not immediately clear what caused the crash, but Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested that the aircraft may have struck a hilltop as it was preparing to land in the city of Isparta.
The fuselage and wings of the MacDonnell Douglas 83, operated by Atlasjet, were torn apart and pieces of metal and bodies, some still in their seats, were scattered across the area, Anatolia news agency reported. There were no signs of an explosion or a fire.
Earth-moving machines had to clear a narrow path up a hillside so that security forces, ambulances and civil defence teams could get to the wreckage, the agency said.
There were 50 passengers -- among them a 45-day-old baby girl -- and seven crew on the jet which crashed shortly after the pilot informed the control tower that he was coming in for the airport.
"There are no survivors either among the passengers or the crew," Tuncay Doganer, Atlasjet's chief executive, told a televised news conference.
Investigators recovered the aircraft's two data recorders -- the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR), known as black boxes -- that will enable them to shed light on the accident.
"It is, of course, not yet certain, but the transport minister told me that they suspect the plane's tail hit a hilltop and that the aircarft fell on its fuselage with the force of the impact," Erdogan said in Ankara.
The plane's debris was found on a 1,830-metre (6,003-foot) hill near Cukuroren village, some 12 kilometres (seven miles) from Isparta airport.
Officials said weather conditions were fine at the time and the pilots did not send a distress signal.
"Turbulence, sudden strong wings, the breaking off of a piece from the aeroplane could have caused this," Tuna Gurel, the chairman of the Turkish Pilots' Association, said in televised remarks.
"I would say pilot error is the last possible cause," he added.
Security forces immediately cordoned off the crash site to keep out weeping relatives as forensic experts collected blood samples from body parts for DNA tests.
"Where are they? Where is my child?" a middle-aged woman cried as she argued with the police to let her through.
"We just want to have the body," a weeping man said.
All the bodies were later removed to a nearby hospital for identification before being handed over to families, Anatolia said.
Isparta Governor Semsettin Uzun said the plane crashed in an area where it was not supposed to be flying, breaking into two.
"The area is not on the plane's route... It is impossible to understand how it ended up there," Uzun told Anatolia.
"The front part of the fuselage is there... There is nothing left from the wings. Pieces are scattered all around," he said.
The jet disappeared from the radar around 1:36 am (2336 GMT) shortly after the pilot informed airport officials that he was descending to land.
It had taken off from Istanbul 45 minutes earlier with the 50 passengers, two pilots, four air hostesses and a technician.
"There was no rain, snowfall or storm at the plane's destination. There were no technical problems with the plane. The pilot was in communication with the tower until the plane disappeared," Doganer said.
There are "1,000 possible scenarios as to what happened," he said.
Atlasjet, set up in 2001, has a fleet of 15 planes and flies to destinations in Turkey and overseas, including Austria, Finland, Italy, Spain and several Balkan countries.
The last major plane accident in Turkey was in 2003 when a Turkish Airlines plane crashed just short of the runway in Diyarbakir in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, killing 75 people.
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