A Cubana de Aviación (Cubana) Boeing 737 carrying 104 passengers and six crew crashed shortly after take-off from Havana’s Jose Martí airport, Cuba, on Friday. 107 passengers and crew were killed, while three female passengers who survived the crash, but who were critically injured, were taken to Galixto Garcia Hospital in Havana.
The plane was on a domestic flight from Havana to Holguín and all but five of the passengers are understood to be Cuban, with Argentina’s foreign ministry confirming that two of its citizens had been killed in the accident. The Cuban Council of Churches announced that 20 clergy members of an evangelical church were among the dead.
The plane, a Boeing 737-201 was built in 1979 and had been leased less than a month ago by Cubana, Cuba’s state airline, from the small Mexican charter company Aerolineas Damojh, also going by the name Global Air. Aerolineas Damojh was solely responsible for the aircraft’s maintenance. As no Cubana pilots were certified to fly the Boeing jet, the company had hired Mexican crew on the understanding they were fully trained and certified by the proper authorities.
Cubana has a good safety record, but over recent months it had taken a number of its planes out of service owing to maintenance problems and has been hiring charter aircraft from other companies.
Cuban Transportation Minister Adel Yzquierdo Rodriguez confirmed that the jet’s “black box” voice recorder had been recovered and that a U.S. request for investigators from Boeing to travel to the island had been granted by Cuban officials. Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s president said a special commission had been formed to establish the cause of the crash.
This is the third fatal air crash in Cuba this decade. In April 2017, a military Antonov AN-26 turboprop crashed killing all eight on board, while in 2010 a commercial Aero Caribbean ATR 72 crashed killing sixty-eight passengers and crew. Cuba’s worst-ever plane crash occurred in 1989 when a Soviet-made Ilyushin-62M passenger plane came down near Havana, killing all 126 people on board.
