Honduran Passenger Jet Overshoots Runway

A long standing problem with the famously bad, short runway with a steep approach at the aging Toncontin International Airport was the site of a terrible but not entirely unexpected crash. In rainy, foggy conditions, 130-140 passengers and crew coming from San Salvador were in the plane that overshot the runway and smashed to a stop on the street of the Honduran Capital. The copilot was pulled from the wreckage and taken to the hospital.

Gas flooded the site of the accident. The pilot was killed and a number of the passengers were injured. An onlooker was quoted as saying that the plane "...left the runway, hit electric cables from a nearby street and then got stuck in the side of a small ravine."

The Miami-bound jet also killed a passenger and a motorist on the ground. The deceased passenger was Nicaraguan Harry Brautigam, president of the Tegucigalpa-based Central American Bank for Economic Integration since 2003; he died of heart problems.

The airport manager publicly stated that "The plane inexplicably circled the city twice and it ran out of runway because it landed more than halfway down" the length of the strip.

Additional details:

• The runway is less than 5,300 feet long.
  
• Springtime burnoff of farm fields can frequently obscure visibility.
  
• In 1997, a U.S. Air Force C-130 cargo plane overshot the runway at Toncontin, caught fire. Three died.
  
• The fuselage buckled and broke. Two cars were trapped under the plane's left engine. The cockpit crushed by a billboard.
  
• In 1989 a Honduran airliner hit a nearby hill at Toncontin International Airport, killing 133 people.
  
• The former head of Honduras' armed forces, Gen. Daniel Lopez Carballo was injured.