Rescuers Friday found the wreckage of an Olympic Airways commuter plane that crashed on the mountains of the Aegean island of Samos, killing all 34 people on board, official Radio Athens said.
Rescue teams located the Olympic Airways plane by signals emitted by the plane's locater device, according to the report quoting army and air transport sources. The aircraft was broken in two and there were no survivors, the report said, adding rescuers had begun recovering the bodies.Air traffic controllers said the small commuter plane Thursday disappeared off the radar screen over the Aegean Sea about half-way to the island of Samos.
At first it was believed the plane crashed into the ocean, but the Athens News Agency later said a C-130 military transport plane had picked up signals emitted from the missing plane in the island's mountainous region.
There were 31 passengers, including one infant, and three crew members aboard the plane, which took off from Thessaloniki in northern Greece at 4:16 p.m. bound for Samos, some 145 miles east of Athens near the Turkish coast.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the crash.
An Olympic Airways statement said Flight 545 was about 40 miles from Samos and at an altitude of 3,500 feet when it disappeared from radar at 4:45 p.m., 15 minutes before it was scheduled to land.
The plane was flying to Samos at the height of the tourist season in Greece.