Madrid Plane Disaster Plunges Spain Into Three Days of Mourning

The Madrid plane crash that killed 153 people yesterday has plunged Spain into three days of official mourning and sparked an investigation of how one of the world's safest aircraft was destroyed on takeoff.

Flags in Madrid are being flown at half-mast and a silent vigil is planned for midday to mark the country's worst air disaster in nearly 25 years.

The king and queen plan to visit a makeshift morgue where families are waiting to claim their relatives' remains. There were 19 survivors from the 172 people on board the Spanair flight from Barajas airport to Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands.

Spanair has said it does not know the cause of the crash. The pilot of the US-built MD-82 airliner initially reported a problem with a gauge that measures temperature outside the plane. After a delay while it was repaired, it began takeoff but crashed at the end of the runway, broke up and caught fire.

The Spanish newspaper El País said one of the two engines failed and may have caught fire. There were reports from witnesses of an explosion and a fire on the left engine.

A makeshift morgue has been set up at Madrid's main convention center, the same building used for relatives to identify bodies after the 2004 Islamist bombings that killed 191 people on commuter trains.

The country's development minister, Magdalana Alvarez, said 14 bodies had been identified so far. She said the process could take several days because many were burned beyond recognition and would need DNA testing.

Spanair chartered a plane in the Canary Islands to fly in relatives of people killed in the crash. Some mourners spent the whole night at the morgue.

Five experts from the US national transportation safety board have been flown in to help Spanish investigators.

Kieran Daly, the editor of Flight International, said although it was premature to speculate on a cause, "accidents on takeoff are relatively rare. The obvious suspicion is some kind of engine problem. The suspicion is that for whatever reason the aircraft had insufficient power to pull away."

Daly said he was puzzled because the plane should still have been able to lift off with one engine.

The MD-80 family of planes – which were built by McDonnell Douglas, now part of Boeing – had been in "one or two nasty accidents" involving engine problems, Daly said.

There are 861 of them still in service across 57 airlines. The design first came into service in the 1980s.

In March, two US carriers, American Airlines and Delta, voluntarily grounded their fleets of MD-80s while their wiring was inspected for compliance with federal maintenance rules.

At the time, analysts stressed that the move did not indicate the planes were unsafe, but it raised questions about their reliability given their age.

The MD-80 family is rated the second-safest in the world by AirDisaster.com, with nine incidents in about 20m flights where a fatality was recorded that was "solely due to the operation of an aircraft".

The particular MD-82 model involved in the Madrid crash carries a maximum of 172 passengers and has a cruising speed of 504mph with Pratt & Whitney engines.

Spanair is a small operator catering that runs tourist charter flights. It is owned by the Scandinavian carrier SAS.