Air Galicia Douglas DC-9-10 "Ribadeo"

Despite eagerly wanting to lead the advent of the Jet Age in Europe, Air Galicia did not find a suitable replacement for the venerable piston propelled Convair 440, which was the backbone of the short haul routes in the Iberian Peninsula. The answer came in 1965 and Air Galicia became one of the first and major operators of the DC-9-10 in Europe, flying roughly 25 of them for more than 20 years.

It had an all-tourist cabin arrangement of 83 seats. The airline also tested a cabin arrangement of 8 premium seats and 65 tourist seats to fly on routes longer than 800km from low traffic airports like Vigo, A Coruña, Oviedo or Santander just to cite a few examples. However, that configuration was discarded as it was found that it's bigger brother, the DC-9-30, performed better in terms of revenues with a 12C 81Y arrangement.

While some of them were replaced during the 80's with the BAe-146 family, a handful of them remained with the airline until the start of the 90's when they were finally replaced by the Boeing 737-500. Most of them were scrapped due to their age and some of them were sold or leased to other airlines.

The airplane depicted here; EC-BAI "Ribadeo" made an emergency landing next to a farm house in the village of Rebordelo, near the town of Pontecaldelas on 17 February 1977, 20 kilometres northeast from Vigo. The plane departed from Vigo and it was scheduled to go to Barcelona via Bilbao. Shortly after takeoff, while flying over Pontevedra, both engines failed and the flight crew was instructed to return to Vigo. After realizing that they would not reach the airport, the captain chose a field on the top of a hill to attempt to perform a hard landing. The airplane became damaged beyond repair as the empennage separated from the fuselage as a result of the crash but miraculously, all the 72 passengers of the flight and 4 crew members survived but 37 people sustained minor to serious injuries.