Colombiaulykken - Curt Lewis

Pilot told Colombia controllers he had 'no fuel' before crashing Rescue workers at the site of an airplane crash in Colombia on Tuesday. MEDELLIN, Colombia - The pilot of the chartered plane carrying a Brazilian soccer team told air traffic controllers he had run out of fuel and desperately pleaded for permission to land before crashing into the Andes, according to a leaked recording of the final minutes of the doomed flight. In the sometimes chaotic exchange with the air traffic tower, the pilot of the British-built jet could be heard repeatedly requesting authorization to land. ''Complete electrical failure, without fuel,'' he said in the tense final seconds before the plane set off on a four-minute death spiral that ended with it slamming into a mountainside Monday night. A female controller could be heard giving instructions as the aircraft lost speed and altitude about eight miles from Medellin's international airport. Just before going silent the pilot said he was flying at an altitude of 9,000 feet and made a final plea for a landing code: ''Vectors, senorita. Landing vectors.'' The recording, obtained Wednesday by Colombian media, appeared to confirm the accounts of a surviving flight attendant and a pilot flying nearby who overheard the frantic exchange. These, along with the lack of an explosion upon impact, point to a rare case of fuel running out as a cause of the crash of the jetliner, which was flying at its maximum range. For now, authorities are avoiding singling out any one cause of the crash, which killed all but six of the 77 people on board, including members of Brazil's Chapecoense soccer team traveling to Medellin for the Copa Sudamericana finals - the culmination a fairy tale season that had electrified soccer-crazed Brazil. The aircraft was carrying the Brazilian side Chapecoense. Twenty-one journalists also were on board. A full investigation is expected to take months and will review everything from the 17-year-old aircraft's flight and maintenance history to the voice and instruments data in the black boxes recovered Tuesday at the crash site on a muddy hillside. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board was taking part in the investigation because the plane's engines were made by an American manufacturer. As the probe continued, mourning soccer fans in Medellin and the southern Brazilian town of Chapeco, where the team is from, were converging on the two cities' soccer stadiums for simultaneous candlelight vigils. The six survivors were recovering in hospitals, with three in critical but stable condition, while forensic specialists worked to identify the victims so they could be transferred to a waiting cargo plane sent by the Brazilian air force to repatriate the bodies. Alfredo Bocanegra, head of Colombia's aviation agency, said that while evidence initially pointed to an electrical problem, the possibility the crash was caused by lack of fuel has not been ruled out. Planes need to have enough extra fuel on board to fly at least 30 to 45 minutes to another airport in the case of an emergency, and rarely fly in a straight line because of turbulence or other reasons. Before being taken offline, the website of LaMia, the Bolivian-based charter company, said the BAE 146 Avro RJ85 jetliner's maximum range was 1,600 nautical miles - just under the distance between Medellin and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where the flight originated carrying close to its full passenger capacity. ''If this is confirmed by the investigators it would be a very painful because it stems from negligence,'' Bocanegra told Caracol Radio on Wednesday when asked whether the plane should not have attempted such a long haul. One key piece to unlocking the mystery could come from Ximena Sanchez, a Bolivian flight attendant who survived the crash and told rescuers the plane had run out of fuel moments before the crash. Investigators were expected to interview her Wednesday at the clinic near Medellin where she is recovering. '''We ran out of fuel. The airplane turned off,''' rescuer Arquimedes Mejia quoted Sanchez as saying as he pulled her from the wreckage. ''That was the only thing she told me,'' he told The Associated Press. Investigators also want to speak to Juan Sebastian Upegui, the co-pilot of an Avianca commercial flight who was in contact with air traffic controllers near Medellin's Jose Maria Cordova airport at the time the chartered plane went down. In a four-minute recording circulated on social media, Upegui described how he heard the flight's pilot request priority to land because he was out of fuel. Growing ever more desperate, the pilot eventually declared a ''total electrical failure,'' Upegui said, before the plane quickly began to lose speed and altitude. ''I remember I was pulling really hard for them, saying 'Make it, make it, make it, make it,''' Upeqgui says in the recording. ''Then it stopped. ... The controller's voice starts to break up and she sounds really sad. We're in the plane and start to cry.'' No traces of fuel have been found at the crash site and the plane did not explode on impact, one of the reasons there were six survivors. John Cox, a retired airline pilot and CEO of Florida-based Safety Operating Systems, said the aircraft's amount of fuel deserves a careful look. ''The airplane was being flight-planned right to its maximum. Right there it says that even if everything goes well they are not going to have a large amount of fuel when they arrive,'' said Cox. ''I don't understand how they could do the flight nonstop with the fuel requirements that the regulations stipulate.''

Colombian Officials Say Crashed Plane Ran Out of Fuel Flight trajectory at limit of Avro RJ85's listed range Rescue workers on Tuesday transferred bodies of the victims of the plane crash near La Unión, Colombia.  Colombian authorities said the charter plane that crashed outside Medellín carrying a Brazilian soccer team ran out of fuel as it tried to complete the long flight from Bolivia to Colombia. "We can clearly affirm that the plane did not have fuel at the moment of impact," Freddy Bonilla, Colombia's secretary of air security, told reporters Wednesday evening. Mr. Bonilla said the plane, owned by the small, Bolivia-based LaMia airlines, had been in violation of international and local regulations that require planes to carry reserve fuel between airports. Investigators will "establish the reason why the crew, and the offices of the airline, allowed the plane to have an insufficient amount of fuel," he said. Accident investigators in Colombia are also looking into the use of the relatively short-range aircraft to make the transcontinental trip between Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Medellín. The distance between the two airports, according to the website Great Circle Mapper, is 1,839 miles. The Avro RJ85's maximum range with a full tank of fuel is 1,842 miles, according to a fact sheet on Airliners.net. Aviation experts say the range of a plane can be influenced by several factors, including winds aloft and the weight it is carrying. The flight went down Monday night carrying its crew, journalists, and the Associação Chapecoense de Futebol, which was traveling to the finals of the Copa Sudamericana. The accident all but wiped out the soccer team, a scrappy underdog that rose to victory and was on its way to compete in its first international finals match. It was scheduled to play against Atlético Nacional of Medellín on Wednesday evening. Rescue workers pulled six survivors from the wreckage, including three Chapecoense players. The remaining 71 passengers perished. The survivors were in stable condition Wednesday, health authorities said. Mr. Bonilla and the head of Colombia's civil aviation authority, Alfredo Bocanegra, said the flight plan of the doomed airliner-which was approved by Bolivian authorities-was direct and didn't include a stop to refuel. Bolivia's civil aviation director of operations, Miguel Patino, said that Aasana, Bolivia's airport authority, is responsible for approving flight plans. An Aasana spokesman couldn't be reached Wednesday. Multiple calls were placed to LaMia's offices in Santa Cruz with no answer. As the doomed flight neared Medellín's José María Cordova International Airport Monday night, it was placed in a holding pattern to await clearance to land after two other commercial flights. "This was an absolutely normal process," said Mr. Bonilla, noting that weather conditions were fine. At 9:49 p.m. the LaMia plane said it needed priority because of a problem with fuel, investigators said. The control tower asked the crew to elaborate on the problem but gave them immediate authorization to approach, Mr. Bonilla said. Less than three minutes later, officials said, the LaMia plane declared a fuel emergency. Air-traffic controllers again told the plane it had landing priority. At 9:57 p.m., the plane reported a total electrical failure and its pilot pleaded for the most direct route to the airport. At that point it was flying low, at 9,000 feet, in an area where planes are required to maintain a minimum altitude of 10,000 feet, investigators said. The tower lost contact with the airline moments later, officials said. The crew's apparent delay in explicitly warning controllers about an emergency harks back to an infamous 1989 crash of an Avianca jetliner that ran out of fuel while approaching to land at New York's Kennedy International Airport. Bad weather prompted controllers to put the four-engine Boeing 707 into three separate holding patterns, totaling more than 70 minutes, and at the end the crew reported there was fuel remaining for only five minutes of flight. The jet went down some 16 miles from the field, killing 73 of 158 people on board. Investigators determined that the crew's mistake in failing to promptly inform controllers about the extent of their fuel problem and to formally declare an emergency helped cause the crash. There are 24 investigators working to determine the official cause of Monday's crash in Colombia, including a British expert on U.K.-built Avro RJ85 planes. The plane's data recorders, retrieved from the accident site on Tuesday, are likely to be sent to the U.S. or the U.K. for analysis, Mr. Bonilla said. "The news of the accident really hit me hard," said Manuel Cortes, 61, who had a ticket for Wednesday's match, but instead was on his way to join tens of thousands of fans in a tribute ceremony for the lost players. "In soccer, we are all brothers."

'Get-home-itis' and macho pride is a lethal mix for pilots A photograph from the cockpit of this week's doomed flight, which was carrying players from Brazilian football club Chapecoense. Picture: Twitter Flying on fumes, as pilots call it, may sound impossible in the modern age but running out of fuel still happens. The cause is usually psychological. Pressure to reach a destination, known in the industry as "get-home-itis," can lead to flight planning that cuts corners and introduces risk. Every year dozens of small aircraft fall victim to wishful thinking by pilots who gamble on stretching range to the maximum. Unexpected headwinds and air traffic delays quickly eat up reserves. The fate of turning into a glider only very rarely befalls airliners, which are governed by strict regulations on reserves and benefit from computerised monitoring of fuel burn. In a case eerily similar to this week's crash, an Avianca Boeing 707 came down near John F Kennedy airport in New York in 1990. The crew of the Colombian airliner was reluctant to declare an emergency when they were put into a holding pattern while low on fuel. After flying from Medellin to New York, they told controllers that they were concerned about fuel but failed to make the distress call that would have given them immediate priority to land. Seventy-three people were killed and 85 survived. The crew's failure was put down to language problems plus the reluctance of all pilots to declare an emergency that was likely to damage their pride and land them in trouble. Pilots explained the fate of the LaMia airliner this week as the likely result of risk-taking under pressure. Miguel Quiroga, the captain, was intent on landing the football team in Medellin, a difficult mountain-ringed airport, in time for them to sleep and prepare for a match. He was not only pilot-in-command but also co-owner of the small Bolivian charter airline that is struggling to make its name. Rescue teams at the scene of the Colombia plane crash. The pilots told the controllers only that they had a "fuel problem" when it was almost too late and even then failed to utter the magic word "emergency" that could have saved them, according to other pilots on the frequency. Gustavo Vargas, the airline's managing director, was at a loss to explain why Captain Quiroga, a former military pilot, decided to forgo a fuel stop in Bogota and head straight to Medellin. According to the rules he was required to have enough fuel to fly back to Bogota if he met unexpected delays once he had arrived over Medellin. Unless there was a physical explanation such as a fuel leak or a feed problem, the crew was breaking the rules. Pilots who operate in South America were astounded that a crew would cut margins so fine in a mountainous area prone to unpredictable weather. Pilots are trained intensively on the danger of bad decision-making under the pressure of "macho" pride and external factors. Commercial pressures on airlines have in recent decades led to the cutting of fuel margins on busy routes. Aircraft sometimes land to refuel short of their destination, but the decision is closely regulated. That does not seem to have been the case at Medellin.