Turkish airliner crashes in Amsterdam, 9 dead

A Turkish Airlines passenger plane with 134 people aboard crashed in light fog while trying to land at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on Wednesday, killing nine and injuring dozens.

Officials said some 84 people were taken to hospitals, including 25 who were severely hurt, when flight TK 1951 from Istanbul crashed into a field short of a runway at Schiphol, Europe's fifth-largest by passenger volume.

Six were in critical condition.

"As far as I know there are no more passengers in the plane," Haarlemmermeer acting Mayor Michel Bezuijen told reporters. "We cannot say anything about the cause at the moment. The priority...is providing help and care."

The bodies of three crew members in the cockpit were still in the plane's wreckage, an investigator told reporters at Schiphol. It was not yet clear if the pilots were among them.

"We have to leave them so that we can investigate before we take the cockpit apart," he said.

Dutch media said the pilot and co-pilot were among the dead. Earlier, officials said 135 people were on board the plane, but that was revised to 134.

Dutch television showed what appeared to be covered bodies on the ground near the crumpled, single-aisle Boeing 737-800.

At least four Americans, who work for the plane's manufacturer Boeing, were on the plane, an official said.

The airliner lay in three parts, with the tail section of the fuselage ripped off, and a wide crack just behind the cockpit. There was no fire visible.

The plane broke up when it hit the ground north of a runway at Schiphol, which is 20 km (12 miles) southwest of Amsterdam's centre. Survivors were rushed to hospitals in Amsterdam as well as nearby Haarlem.

LIGHT WINDS

Weather reports at the time of the crash indicated decent visibility despite misty conditions, and light winds.

"I thought it was a car collision. We heard a sort of loud and strange sound," eyewitness Randy Cordes, 14, told Reuters. "I saw one engine that was burning but the fire died quickly."

A flight from Istanbul carrying relatives of crash victims was due later on Wednesday.

The Turkish airliner was reported to have landed two miles (3.2 km) short of the runway on an approach from the north.

One local media report quoted a farmer saying it had hit a tree as it sank to the ground.

"It should have been at 600 feet (180 m) at that point, if it was two miles short," former Boeing pilot Alistair Rosenschein told Britain's Sky News television.

Dutch Transport Minister Camiel Eurlings has said Turkish Airlines met all safety regulations at Schiphol, but added in a statement that the cause of the accident will be investigated.

"The pilot is an experienced one who is a former member of the Turkish Air Force," Turkish Airlines CEO Temel Kotil said.

Wednesday's crash was the 11th accident involving a Turkish Airlines flight in the past 20 years, the NLR Air Traffic Safety Institute in Amsterdam said in a statement.

Turkish Airlines had a troublesome safety record in the 1970s, with 608 lives lost in around two years, but the modern airline's safety record has improved and Wednesday's crash was its second fatal incident this decade, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.

Tuesday's crash appeared to be the worst at Schiphol since an El Al cargo plane crashed into high-rise apartment blocks in 1992, killing 43 people, 39 of them on the ground.