Crew 6 Aircraft type Airbus A320-233 Survivor 121 | Passengers 118 Survivors 121 Date 30 May 2008 Injuries (non-fatal) 65 | |
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Summary Runway overrun, Pilot error Fatalities 5 (including 2 on the ground) Similar Sudan Airways Flight 109, Belavia Flight 1834, Iran Aseman Airlines Fl, 2008 Chișinău Antonov, Hewa Bora Airways Flight 122 | ||
TACA Flight 390 was a scheduled flight on May 30, 2008, by TACA Airlines from San Salvador, El Salvador, to Miami, Florida, United States, with intermediate stops at Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula in Honduras. In this hull loss accident, the Airbus A320-233 (registration EI-TAF, c/n 1374) overran the runway after landing at Tegucigalpa's Toncontín International Airport and rolled out into a street, crashing into an embankment and smashing several cars in the process.
Contents
Passengers
The flight crew included Salvadorans Captain Cesare Edoardo D'Antonio Mena and First Officer Juan Rodolfo Artero Arevalo. All cabin crew members operating on the flight were Hondurans. The passengers consisted of:
A list of passengers was provided in the fifth press release on the crash from TACA Airlines. This list was in the Spanish and English sections.
Five people were confirmed dead as a result of the accident, including Captain D'Antonio. The deceased passengers were later confirmed as Jeanne Chantal Neele, wife of Brian Michael Fraser Neele (Brazil's ambassador to Honduras), and Nicaraguan businessman Harry Brautigam, president of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration; Brautigam died from a heart attack. Ambassador Fraser Neele sustained injuries in the crash. The former head of the Honduran armed forces, General Daniel López Carballo, was also injured. There were two fatalities on the ground, one a taxi driver, in one of three vehicles crushed on the street by the aircraft. Mario Castillo, a survivor, said that the business class passengers sustained the most serious injuries.
Investigation
Honduran authorities delegated the investigation of the accident to the Civil Aviation Authority of El Salvador as per the Convention on International Civil Aviation. According to black box recordings and a report from the NTSB, the cause of the accident was a human error by the deceased pilot, who landed 400 meters (0.2 miles) beyond the threshold of runway 02 (the tower had cleared the aircraft to land on runway 02).