The aircraft missed takeoff and caught fire, and the passengers were evacuated urgently. The plane was part of the TAROM fleet until the end of 2022, and the images before the accident show that the logo of the Romanian company still appeared on the fuselage.
Ten people were injured, Senegal’s land and air transport minister said, and according to a military man present at the scene of the accident, four of them were in serious condition. The injured were taken to hospital, while the other passengers of the aircraft were taken to a hotel near the airport.
One of the injured is the Romanian co-pilot Cristian Budiaci, a pilot at the former BlueAir company. It appears on video a few minutes after the accident and after the evacuation, on the ground, while waiting for the ambulance to arrive.
The Air Sénégal flight operated by TransAir was heading to Bamako in Mali on Wednesday night with 79 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew on board when the accident occurred. The airport is located approximately 50 kilometers from Dakar.
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Passengers jumped down the emergency chutes at night as flames engulfed part of the aircraft and screams could be heard all around, said Malian musician Cheick Siriman Sissoko, who filmed the passengers’ ordeal with his phone camera.
“I saw my life flash before my eyes,” he said. “I thought about my mother, my wife, my children,” Sissoko, 39, told The Associated Press from the hotel where the passengers were staying.
“Only the chute on one side opened, so it was complete panic during the evacuation,” he added.
Ibrahim Diallo, 20, a Malian national on board the plane, said the aircraft had tried to take off earlier that night but failed. “The pilot told us that everything was under control and that we would try to take off again,” he told the AP. “The second time, smoke started coming out of one of the wings.”
“The crew announced the fact that they are encountering quite big problems with the hydraulic system, which is why the rejected take-off procedure was initiated. As the aircraft braked hard to stop at the end of the runway, it went to the left side. When this aircraft stopped, a fire broke out in the area of the wing on the left side”, explained Marius Popescu, aviation expert.
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The plane is a 737-300 model and was part of the TAROM fleet until the end of 2022. The last flight for TAROM was in August 2022, on the Paris-Bucharest route.
Then, the Romanian airline sold the plane plus three others, all Boeing, to a company from Saudi Arabia. TAROM would have collected five million for the whole lot. That’s how the plane ended up in the possession of the Transavia company from Senegal. In fact, part of the TAROM logo could still be seen on the tail, which had not been completely sealed.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), through the Embassy of Romania in Dakar, was notified about the plane crash at the Blaise Diagne International Airport, Republic of Senegal, on the night between May 8 and 9, 2024, the pilot of the aircraft being a Romanian citizen”, transmitted the MAE, for Europa FM.
The MAE specifies that, according to the information available at the level of the diplomatic mission, no deaths were recorded as a result of the accident. The pilot of Romanian origin suffered a double fracture in one leg.
The Romanian ambassador to Senegal traveled on May 9, 2024 to the hospital unit where the Romanian pilot is admitted, states the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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