By Brian Ellsworth
CARACAS (Reuters) - Trekking through cold and ruggedterrain, search teams scoured the Venezuelan Andes on Fridayfor a passenger plane feared to have crashed with 46 passengerson board in the mountain region.
At daylight, authorities still had not found thetwin-engined plane operated by local airline Santa Barbara thatdisappeared soon after taking off before dusk on Thursday,national civil defence chief Antonio Rivero said.
"Up until now the plane is still missing," he told statetelevision. "There are no eyewitnesses."
The plane was headed from the mountain city of Merida,which is notoriously difficult to fly out of, to the capitalCaracas roughly 300 miles (500 km) away. There were 43passengers and three crew members aboard, authorities said.
There was no evidence the pilot made distress calls to airtraffic controllers, Rivero added.
Scores of officials had also gathered in the area toprepare an aerial search of the flight's route, he said.Aircraft could not fly over the zone during the night becauseof the danger of navigating through the mountains in the dark.
Mountain villagers reported hearing a huge noise theythought could be a crash soon after the disappearance of flight518, local civil defense official Gerardo Rojas said.
The passenger list included a well-known Venezuelanpolitical analyst and relatives of a senior governmentofficial, authorities said.
Family members who had waited for their loved ones toarrive in Caracas received help from state psychologists todeal with anxiety. They were set to fly on Friday to the areaof the suspected crash.
TOUGH FLIGHT CONDITIONS
Pilots need special training to fly from the Merida airportbecause the city is so tightly hemmed in by mountains thatplanes must make steep ascents at takeoff.
Visibility at dusk becomes so difficult planes are onlyallowed to take off during daylight. The plane involved inThursday's incident was the day's last flight out.
Still, weather conditions and visibility were described asoptimum at the time of takeoff by one air rescue official.
The first search parties travelled toward the Paramo Mifafivalley, a chilly area in a region of some snow-capped peaks ofup to 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) that is home to condors andhiking routes that make it popular with backpacker tourists.
The head of Santa Barbara, a small Venezuelan airline thatcovers domestic routes and has seven Merida flights a day, saidthe roughly 20-year-old plane was well-maintained and had norecord of technical problems.
The pilot had worked with the airline for eight years SantaBarbara President Jorge Alvarez told television stationGlobovision.
"I have to believe the pilot was certainly both competentand well-suited" for the flight, he said.
Venezuelan newspapers splashed news of the missing plane ontheir front pages. The plane was an ATR 42-300, a turbopropaircraft built by French-Italian company ATR.
The ATR 42 series has been involved in at least 17accidents since first flying in 1984, according to the AviationSafety Network, a private air safety monitoring agency.
Thursday's was the second major incident involving aVenezuelan flight this year after a plane carrying 14 people,including eight Italians and one Swiss passenger, crashed intothe sea close to a group of Venezuelan islands in January.
(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel; Saul Hudson,Ana Isabel Martinez and Enrique Andres Pretel; Editing by EricBeech)
