A Turkish airliner crashed at Amsterdam’s main airport about 10:40 a.m. Wednesday local time, Dutch airport officials said.
There were conflicting reports about whether anyone was killed on the plane, which had 135 people onboard. An airline official told CNN sister station CNN-Turk that at least one person was confirmed dead, but Turkish transportation minister Binali Yildrim said no one had died but that there were injured. Journalist Ivan Watson in Istanbul said Turkish media quoted one crash survivor saying people were able to walk away from the crash.
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“He said the back of the plane hit the ground first. He said it was not an extremely horrible situation, it was like being in turbulence. He said it was more like a sudden impact, then we stopped.” CNN’s Matthijs Spits said from the Netherlands that local footage showed “10s of people” walking away from parts of the plane. He said the plane had not reached the runway but there had been no fire. The Boeing 737-800, which originated from Istanbul, Turkey, was trying to land at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol when it went down. Pictures from the crash site showed the plane split in three parts. Greg Crouch, a journalist for RTL at the scene of the crash, told CNN that the weather was very reasonable at the time of the incident, with no wind or rain. He added that the plane came down close to the A9 highway, one of the Netherlands’ major road routes. Kieran Daly, of Air Transport Intelligence, said the pictures indicated there had not been a widespread fire. He said the impact had been severe but it could have been survivable because of the lack of fire.
Daly said there had been vast improvements in the materials used to build airplanes, meaning they did not burn as easily. He added that the airline had a good safety record, was successful, modern and well thought of in the industry.
