The captain of a holiday jet which crashed in a Spanish storm lost sight of the runway in turbulent weather, an official crash report has revealed.

The Britannia Airways Boeing 757, with 236 passengers on board, skidded off a runway at Girona airport, in Spain, in September last year, before breaking up in a field.

There were no fatalities on flight, which had left earlier from Cardiff, but 43 passengers were hurt - one of whom, Charles Bryant, 84, died three days later having been released from hospital in Spain.

Flight conditions over the Costa Brava - turbulent, with a wet runway, heavy rain and thunder - were so bad that the captain lost sight of the runway, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch interim report said.

After aborting one landing because of a change in wind direction Brendan Nolan, 57, tried another approach, but having decided to land he "lost outside visual references", said the report.

The plane then hit the runway very hard in a nose-down position, bounced, and touched down again 140 metres further on.

It veered off the runway and ran over an earth mound - a collision which sent the plane semi-airborne.

With the plane in the air again, its right wing struck and severed a number of medium-sized trees before the aircraft swung to the right, passed through a fence and re-landed in a field.

It came to rest after a 244-metre slide across the field with the fuselage almost severed at two points and with the nose landing gear and both engines detached.

Plane skidded 1,730 metres

The report said that the passengers, who had included three infants, had remained conscious and had not suffered incapacitating injuries.

From the time of its first contact with the runway, the aircraft had travelled about 1,730 metres, the report added.

Passengers, who had feared that the plane could explode, complained at the delay before the emergency services arrived.

The report said: "Rescue and fire-fighting services had difficulty locating the aircraft and reaching the site.

"They arrived on the scene about 20 minutes after the accident and spent a further 50 minutes in recovering the occupants to the terminal."

Britannia Airways said it welcomed the publication of the interim report.

"Any explanation as to the causes and contributory factors of the accident will not be made known until the final report is published by the AAIB," the airline added.