ALL 189 people on board a Boeing 757 charter aircraft, most of them German tourists heading home after a two week holiday, were feared killed yesterday after it crashed in the Caribbean.
The crash occurred after the aircraft took off from the resort of Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic. Tour operators said lightning may have damaged its engines.
US Coast Guard vessels joined the rescue effort before dawn yesterday. Officers said they and the Dominican navy had picked up 40 bodies by afternoon, some of them injured by sharks.
Dominican officials said there was little hope that anyone survived. The Coast Guard said schools of circling sharks made it too dangerous to use divers.
The aircraft apparently sank quickly but reports of empty liferafts floating among the debris suggested some passengers may have escaped from the wreckage, only to be blown towards the sharks by stormy winds and eight foot waves.
The aircraft, chartered by the German based Oeger tour agency, was owned by the private Turkish airline Birgen Air but was being flown on behalf of the Dominican company Alas Nacionales (National Wings). It was taking its passengers home to Berlin and Frankfurt.
It had taken off from the popular beach resort at 11.43 p.m. on Tuesday, heading north towards the eastern US and a scheduled refuelling stop in Gander, Newfoundland. It reached 5,000 ft before it disappeared from airport radar screens a few minutes later. One unconfirmed report said it was a substitute aircraft.
Although the crew made no emergency contact with the control tower, a Dominican aviation official said the aircraft apparently had tried to turn back towards Puerto Plata just before going down.
"While Dominican air traffic controllers were transferring control to Puerto Rico controllers, the plane began to descend. They watched the airplane disappear on the radar screen," he said.
"We doubt there are any survivors, said Gen Juan Bautista Rojas Tabar of the Dominican Air Force. "It appears that the airplane sank immediately. We found some floating debris but no pieces of the plane."
A US Coast Guard spokesman, Mr Luis Diaz, said the biggest visible piece of debris appeared to be part of the landing gear. "There are a lot of small pieces so it looks like the plane hit pretty hard," he said.
In Hamburg, Mr Vural Oeger, head of the tour operator through which at least 120 of the passengers were booked, said he had heard from airline officials in the Dominican Republic that lightning may have damaged both engines.
At the time of the crash, the northern coast of the Dominican Republic was being lashed by storms from the tail end of a westerly cold front which had battered Florida.