Chaos at airline | What went wrong? | Full passenger list | Pictures

As investigators piece together the final moments of flight JK5022, it has emerged that the aircraft involved in the Madrid air disaster had seen two flights cancelled in previous days because of technical problems.

One hundred and fifty-three people died when the Spanair MD-82 packed with tourists headed for the Canary islands caught fire as it lifted off from Barajas airport yesterday afternoon. Witnesses said that it climbed barely 60 metres into the air before crashing down into a wooded area by the runway.

Some of the 19 people who survived apparently did so because they were thrown into a stream as the aircraft broke up, escaping the fireball that claimed many of the victims.

Relatives of the passengers were arriving today at a Madrid convention centre also used as a makeshift morgue after the al-Qaeda train bombing of March 2003 hoping to identify the bodies, many of which were burnt beyond recognition.

"I’d kill the bastard who did this," one man shouted at a television crew as he drove past the building.

Others asked why the plane was allowed to take off after aborting an initial attempt to get off the ground shortly before the accident. Spanair suggested that the pilot had complained about a faulty fuel gauge, but airport sources said that the plane might have suffered a mechanical problem.

It was reported to have had other technical issues in recent days. Javier Fernandez Garcia, the flight coordinator at Madrid airport, told El Mundo newspaper: "This aircraft already had two flights cancelled because of problems."

Priests and psychologists comforted distraught relatives overnight at Barajas airport and at the Las Palmas airport on Gran Canaria, where flight JK5022 was headed. The plane was operating on a codeshare with Lufthansa although only four Germans were aboard the flight.

According to a list published by Spanair, the vast majority of the passengers were Spanish, but officials said that there were also passengers from Sweden, the Netherlands and Chile.

The plane was 15 years old, bought by Spanair from Korean Air in 1999, and was overhauled in January.

As three days of national mourning were declared, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Prime Minsiter, interrupted his holidays in southern Spain to fly to the scene. The Spanish Olympic Committee said the Spanish flag would fly at half mast in the Olympic village in Beijing.

Spanair, owned by the Scandinavian airline SAS, has been struggling with high fuel prices and tough competition. It announced it was laying off 1,062 staff and cutting routes after losing some £40 million in the first half of the year.

Air safety experts pointed out that Europe had been free of major plane disasters in recent years but take-offs still posed the greatest risk for flgiht crews.

Kieran Daly, editor of internet news service Air Transport Intelligence, said: "Take-off accidents are very, very rare. You reach a point in take-off when it is unlikely that anything can go wrong but if things do go wrong, they can go wrong very quickly.

"On take-off, pilots reach a point of no return, known as V1 speed, which is usually reached about two seconds before take-off. If you go above V1 and abort the take-off, there is insufficient room at the end of the runway and there is the chance of going off the end of the runway at a very fast speed and things can then go very badly wrong."

Mr Daly went on: "The normal rule is that if you go beyond V1 and something goes wrong, you take off anyway. If, for example, a tyre blew, you would take off. A problem at the point of take-off is very challenging for the pilot. If something happens at the point of V1, he is committed to taking off. If there is an engine failure at this point, he is flying an aircraft at very low speed."

Mr Daly said the recovery of the flight data recorder - actually orange in colour but popularly known as the black box - would allow investigators to know the state of the engines in the seconds before the crash. "They should be able to work out whether the plane was in a flyable condition in those last few moments," he said.

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