Global General
Family members visit Libya crash survivor
(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-05-13 21:44
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 Rescue workers examine debris from Afriqiyah Airways flight 8U771 at Tripoli airport May 12, 2010. [Agencies] |
Officials had no immediate explanation for how the boy survived the crash that killed everyone else on the plane.
But there have been at least five cases this decade of a single survivor in a commercial plane crash. Last summer, a young girl was found clinging to wreckage 13 hours after a plane went down in the water off the Comoros Islands.
In a field near the Tripoli airport runway, little was left of the Afriqiyah Airbus.
Libya's transport minister, Mohammed Zaidan, said the plane's two black boxes had been found and turned over to analysts. He said the cause of the crash was under investigation, but authorities had ruled out a terrorist attack.
Afriqiyah Airways said Flight 771 was carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew.
It said the passengers included 58 Dutch, six South Africans, two Libyans, two Austrians, one German, one Zimbabwean, one French and two British. The nationality of 19 more passengers have yet to be established, it said in a later statement. All 11 crew members were Libyan, it added.
Many of the passengers were booked to travel from Tripoli on to other destinations in Europe.
More than 600 A330s have been built since the type entered service in 1994. The Afriqiyah crash is only the second fatal accident involving an A330 in airline service. The other was the crash of Air France flight 447 a year ago off the coast of Brazil.
But last month, an A330 belonging to Cathay Pacific was forced to make an emergency landing in Hong Kong because of engine trouble. Fifty-seven passengers suffered mostly slight injuries in the ensuing evacuation.
The Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department said control problems with the two Rolls-Royce engines forced the Airbus to land at a higher-than-normal speed, damaging an engine cowling, puncturing the tires and causing a small fire in the wheelwell.
The pilots reported that they were unable to get the engines to function normally, and that during the approach and landing phase one was operating at 17 percent of thrust while the other was stuck at 70 percent.
