110 passengers were killed in a plane crash in Havana, Cuba on Friday, May 18. This is the worst plane crash for a Cuban airline in over 30 years. Three survivors are now in critical condition.

“I don’t have the words,” flight attendant for Global Air Ana Marlen said. “We’re in mourning. It was something really, really, really terrible; a tragedy for us.”

Among the victims onboard the Cubana airlines flight to Holguin, Cuba was 99 Cuban passengers, six flight crew members and five foreign passengers. The three survivors were all Cuban women.

It is not yet determined why the plane crashed minutes after takeoff. However, the plane was almost 40 years old, one of the oldest planes that is still in service. The plane veered to a cassava field where it crashed, avoiding the residential area nearby.

“It had an engine on fire, in flames, it was falling toward the ground,” salon owner Rocio Martinez said.

The fire was put out by local firefighters soon after the aircraft hit the ground.

In earlier months, Cubana Airlines had been having maintenance problems with several of their other planes, so they had turn to renting aircrafts from other companies. In this type of situation, one carrier provides the plane, flight crew and maintenance to the carrier that is renting it. The plane that crashed was first a Global Air aircraft, an airline in Mexico, but had been used by several other airlines.

Adel Rodriguez is the Cuban Transportation Minister. He was interviewed in a press conference in Havana on the saturday following the crash.

“It is habitual for us to rent planes,” Rodriguez said. “This is not the only plane that we have rented. … As the leases come up, we rent other planes.”

In addition to maintenance problems, the airline is also having problems because of the growing tourism in the Cuba. They do not have enough planes to support this many people coming in and out of the country. In some cases, they do not have the right parts and tools to fix the planes they already have. This they blame the United States for and the embargo the US has placed on communist Cuba.

“This is something that we do in Cuba,” Rodriguez said. “Because it is convenient, and also because of the blockade problem that we have. We can’t buy the planes that we need, and so we need to rent them.”

The weekend after the crash was issued as two days of mourning for the victims. Flags were flown at half-mast on public buildings and military institutions in Cuba. The investigation is still ongoing and Mexican officials said they will send a team of experts to help investigate the scene.