The holiday season crash at Madrid's Barajas International Airport turned a wooded area off the end of a runway into a hellish scene of charred bodies and smouldering wreckage. It is Spain's worst air disaster in nearly 25 years.

Only 19 people survived the Spanair MD-82 crash and some were in a critical condition, said Spain's development minister Magdalena Alvarez, whose department oversees civil aviation.

Spanair's website published the names of those on board but not the nationalities. It said 20 of those on board were children and two others were babies.

The airline did not release a death toll, but said the plane carried 172 passengers and crew.

As smoke billowed from the wreckage, dozens of fire engines and ambulances rushed to help, lining a nearby road and filling a field next to a swath of charred vegetation. Helicopters flew overhead, dumping water on fires.

"The scene is devastating," said Pablo Albella, an emergency rescue worker. "The fuselage is destroyed. The plane burned. I have seen a kilometre of charred land and few whole pieces of the fuselage. It is all destruction."

Rescuers rushed the few survivors to hospitals, while emergency workers shrouded the dead in white sheets. One body lay on burned grass, an arm and a leg poking out.

Later, a long convoy of black hearses rolled on to the airport grounds to carry bodies to a makeshift mortuary set up at Madrid's main convention centre -- the same facility used for relatives to identify bodies after the March 11 2004 terror attacks that killed 191 people on Madrid commuter trains.

Mourners went to a special waiting area, avoiding photographers and reporters.