Four Killed as Military Transport Plane Crashes in Spain
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Version 0 of 1. SEVILLE, Spain — An Airbus A400M military transport plane crashed in a field in Seville on Saturday, killing four of the six people aboard, a government official said. The plane was on a test flight when it crashed one mile north of the San Pablo airport in Seville, emergency services said. Six people were onboard; four died on impact and the two others were seriously injured, a government spokeswoman said. The plane crashed into an electricity pylon while attempting an emergency landing and caused a power failure in a nearby neighborhood, the newspaper El Mundo said, citing a witness. An Airbus spokesman and a government spokeswoman declined to comment on the cause of the crash. It was a blow to the defense project, Europe’s largest, which had to be bailed out by European governments in 2010 after delays and cost overruns. Airbus said that the transport plane, which is assembled in Seville, had been ordered by Turkey, and that the company had sent a team to the crash site. The Spanish government has also sent a team to investigate the crash, a government official said. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said it appeared that all those onboard were Spanish Airbus employees. The A400M Atlas was developed for Spain and six other NATO nations — Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Luxembourg and Turkey — at a cost of $22 billion. It entered service in 2013 after a delay of more than three years. Designed to put troops and heavy equipment into remote battlefields or to carry out humanitarian missions, the aircraft was intended to fill a gap between the smaller Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules and the Boeing C-17 cargo jet. |