LIMA, Peru — One passenger remembered a "tomb-like silence" in the cabin of the Peruvian airliner in the seconds after it crash-landed in a jungle marsh and splintered apart. Another recalled grabbing a baby boy from the wreckage and carrying the child to safety through thigh-deep mud.
They were among 58 fortunate passengers and crew members who survived the crash, dragging themselves from the wreckage of the aircraft and pushing through deep mud in a hailstorm. An aviation expert called it "a miracle" that so many walked away.
At least 37 others, including the pilot, died, and three were still missing Wednesday, authorities said.
Yuri Salas, a 38-year-old Peruvian, said there was silence in the cabin immediately after the crash.
"I felt a strong impact and a light and fire and felt I was in the middle of flames around the cabin, until I saw to my left a hole to escape through," Salas said.
He said an Italian man and woman escaped through the same hole but were "burned on their faces, and their bodies were red." "The fire was fierce despite the storm," he said. "Hail was falling, and the mud came up to my knees." Jose Leandro Vivas, 43, a Peruvian-American from the Brooklyn borough of New York, survived the crash, along with his three daughters, his brother and his sister-in-law.
The pilot began his approach to the airport in torrential rains and strong winds, which passengers said began rocking the plane 10 minutes before the scheduled landing Tuesday afternoon. Four miles from the airstrip, he attempted an emergency landing.
Belevan said the three missing people might include survivors from Pucallpa who returned home after the crash without receiving medical assistance.
Television images of the crash site showed mutilated bodies being retrieved from a marsh near the Pucallpa airport where the pilot had attempted an emergency landing. The fuselage was shattered and pieces strewn along a 1,640-foot path made by the plane as it crash-landed.
"A plane is totally destroyed and more than 50 percent of the passengers have survived," John Elliot, an experienced Peruvian pilot and aviation expert, said in an interview with the AP, calling it "a miracle." The pilot apparently aimed for the marsh to soften the impact, but the aircraft broke apart in the landing, strewing pieces of fuselage as it skidded over the boggy ground.
Belevan credited the expertise of the pilots and insisted the plane did not crash. "The plane made an emergency landing and the accident occurred during the emergency landing," he said. He said wind shear was believed to have caused the problems with the plane.
Wind shear is a sudden change in wind speed or direction. The most dangerous kind, called a micro burst,is caused by air descending from a thunderstorm.
But Elliot and Victor Girao, a former president of Peru's Association of Pilots, said the crash appeared to be due to pilot error. Elliot said the pilot should have opted to avoid the storm and land at another airport.
Both said the pilot was flying too close to the ground while making the approach to the airport, making it difficult to control the aircraft against wind shear.
"They were coming in very low, looking for the airstrip. A big beginners' error," Girao said.
Search teams have recovered the plane's cockpit flight data recorder, said Pablo Arevalo, a prosecutor in Pucallpa.
Belevan said 18 foreigners were aboard the aircraft — 11 Americans, four Italians, one Colombian, one Australian and one from Spain.
Among the dead were at least four foreigners — an American man and woman, a Spanish woman and a Colombian woman, said Manuel Rodriguez Rojas, an identification expert for the National Elections Board sent to Pucallpa to help identify the dead.
Rodriguez identified the Americans as Stephen Michael Lotti, 28, through his boarding pass, and Sherra Young Gay through a visa card found on her body. No home towns were available for either. Airline disasters this month have killed 325 people. The previous deadliest month was May 2002, with three major crashes that killed at least 485. Weather was a common factor in several of the crashes, said Bill Waldock, an aviation safety professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona.
More plane crashes tend to happen in August, because thunderstorms — especially dangerous to planes — are more frequent.
"It's one of those odd little blips. Quite a few accidents have happened in August," he said, citing U.S. airline crashes in 1985, 1987 and 1988.
Last week, 160 people died when a Colombian-registered West Caribbean charter went down in Venezuela. Two days earlier, 121 people died when a Cyprus-registered Helios Airways Boeing plunged into the mountains north of Athens.
Sixteen people were believed to have died Aug. 6 when a plane operated by Tunisia's Tuninter crashed off Sicily. In Toronto, all 309 people survived aboard an Air France Airbus A340 that overshot the runway on Aug. 2.
In January 2003, a TANS twin engine Fokker 28 turbojet, plowed into a 11,550-foot high mountain in Peru's northern jungle, killing all 42 passengers and four crew members aboard.