Pilots threatened strikes at 'chaotic' airline | Analysis: what went wrong? | Pictures: Madrid air carnage

At least 153 people were killed today when a packed passenger jet caught fire and overshot the runway as it tried to take off from Madrid's main international airport. Most of the victims were thought to be Spanish and German holidaymakers heading for the Canary Islands.

The Spanair plane crashed and broke apart after failing to lift off from runway No 6 at the Barajas airport at 2.23pm local time en route for Las Palmas airport on Gran Canaria.

An official with the municipal rescue service said that all but 27 of the 175 people aboard - 166 passengers, including two children, and nine crew - had been killed.

"The plane was all broken up, all full of bodies," an airport authority worker at the scene said.

“Nothing remains that looks like a plane,” a member of the Guardia Civil returning from the crash scene said. “It’s horrific, everything’s burned. It’s a horror, I don’t want to tell you, I don’t want to tell you.”

With blackened face, he continued: “It’s the most like hell I’ve ever seen. The bodies were boiling, we were burned trying to remove them.”

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister, broke off from his holidays in the south of the country and headed to the scene of Spain's worst aviation disaster for more than 20 years.

The airport was immediately closed as firefighters aboard 11 engines tried to tackle a blaze on the plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82. Helicopters circled above, dousing the wreckage and surrounding wildfires with water. Forty-five ambulances were sent to the scene in what one rescue worker said was the city's biggest rescue effort since the al-Qaeda bombing of March 11, 2004.

Initial reports suggested that an engine on the left hand side of the aircraft caught fire as the plane headed down the runway, impeding its take-off and sending it careening off onto a grassy area near the terminal building. The smoke could be seen several kilometres away.

El Pais reported that the aircraft had already attempted one take-off but had had unspecified difficulties. Another newspaper, La Vanguardia, said that the pilot had been unable to lift the plane's nose. The plane had originally been due to take off at 1.05pm.

Flight JK 5022 was on a codeshare with Lufthansa, flight LH 2554, which prompted speculation that many of those aboard were Germans who had transferred on to the aircraft at Madrid after flying in this morning from Munich.

Relatives of those aboard the plane soon began arriving at the airport, where a spokesman said that a room had been set aside for them and psychological counselling was on offer. A similar room was set up at the destination airport on Gran Canaria where anxious relatives complained that they were being kept in the dark.

Injured passengers were taken to at least five hospitals in the Madrid area, Eight injured passengers were taken to the La Paz hospital and a further eight to the Ramon y Cajal. One of the 28 passengers pulled from the plane alive died on the journey. Other Madrid hospitals were told to free up facilities - although it was unclear whether they would be needed given the heavy death toll.

Charred remains were taken to the same makeshift morgue at the city’s main convention centre that was used in the aftermath of the Madrid train bombing.

In the last ten years, 42 people have been killed in plane accidents in Spain. Today's crash might prove even more deadly than one in Bilbao in February 1985, in which 148 people were killed.

The worst plane crash in Spain's history was on March 27, 1977, when two planes collided at Los Rodeos airport in Tenerife, killing 585 people.

Spanair is a subsidiary of the Scandinavian airline SAS, which said in a statement: "Spanair is doing everything possible to assist the Spanish authorities at this difficult time. Spanair will provide further information as soon as it becomes available."

The cause of the crash is not yet known but emergency workers reported that they had recovered the plane’s black box from the wreckage.

The crash came just hours after pilots at the airline threatened to strike over SAS's cost-cutting plans at the struggling Majorca-based airline, which has been making heavy losses.

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