Peruvian Aircraft with 42 Aboard Reported Missing (merged)

[redbull]

Lima, Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- A Peruvian plane operated by Tans Peru airline with 42 people on board was reported missin, Canal N local television said.
The company's press officer Jorge Belevan said plane took off from northern city of Chiclayo at 08:30 this morning and was expected to land in the jungle city of Chachapoyas, 660km NE of Lima, 16 mins later. It lost contact with air control at the airport at 08:43, he told the television station.
"The plane was not reported as crashed," Belevan said, "What happened is the plane lost contact with ground. The plane is in emergency situation and declared missing."

[Biggles Flies Undone]

F28. Breaking news on CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/01/09/peru.crash/index.html

[ORAC]

Peruvian Plane with 42 Passengers Missing
Thu January 9, 2003 12:36 PM ET

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Air traffic controllers lost contact with a Tans Peru plane carrying 42 passengers plus four crew members on Thursday as it approached a small mountain airport in a northern Peruvian jungle area visited by tourists, the company said.
"The Fokker F-28 plane ... was declared in emergency at 8:43 a.m. (EST) near the Chachapoyas airport and ... from that point on, we lost contact with the plane and have not had more news," Jorge Belevan, head of the state airline's public relations, told RPP radio.

A community telephone operator in Luya, near Chachapoyas, told RPP radio that medical officials were heading to an area called Lonya Chico. "It appears that there are people wounded," she said.

Belevan said the plane had enough fuel to circle the airport and could have landed at another site, adding that weather conditions were "normal."

Lizandro Torres, another Tans spokesman, told Reuters that officials lost contact with the plane about five minutes before it was scheduled to land.

Belevan said a search was being mounted for the plane, which was traveling from the coastal city of Chiclayo to Chachapoyas, some 390 miles north of Lima. Chachapoyas is often visited by tourists traveling to Kuelap, a mountain citadel predating the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

According to a spokesman for the Chiclayo airport, the plane took off at 8:17 a.m. for the 30-minute flight. Tans Peru launched its twice-weekly Chiclayo-Chachapoyas route in November 2002, part of a plan to boost tourism in the mountainous jungle region and promote Kuelap.
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(CNN) -- Peru's air force was searching Thursday for a plane carrying 42 passengers and four crew members that radioed a distress call and then was lost from radar over Peru's Amazon jungle, a spokesman for TANS Airlines said.

TANS Flight 222 was three minutes from its scheduled landing at an airport in Chachapoyas, 400 miles north of the capital of Lima, when it called in an emergency at 8:43 a.m. EST, said TANS spokesman Jorge Belevan.

"They communicated with the control tower and said they would be landing momentarily," said Minister of Interior Gino Costa Santolalla. "A little bit later, they lost communication with the control tower, and then the plane disappeared from radar."

The air force and national police were coordinating the search for the Fokker F28 in the surrounding forest and mountains, which was focused near Lonya Chico, the minister said. A number of helicopters were deployed to the area.

The twin-engine plane had departed on the half-hour scheduled flight from the coastal city of Chiclayo, 410 miles northwest of Lima, Belevan said.

Back Aviation Solutions, which provides consulting and data information services to the aviation industry, said TANS has only one such plane in its fleet -- a 27-year-old model that has 65 seats. OB-1396 (http://home.concepts-ict.nl/~mmgmdrunen/tans-ob1396-fap390.jpg)

[CHK Y'R 6]

Peruvian plane reported missing
Air traffic controllers lost contact with a Tans Peru plane carrying 42 passengers plus four crew members on Thursday as it approached a small mountain airport in a northern Peruvian jungle area visited by tourists, the company said.
Jan 9, 2003, 12:54

More news at latest aviation news (http://luchtvaart.pagina.nl)

[Sensible Garage]

09jan03 OB-1396 F28-1000 11110
Transportes Aéreos Nacionales de la Selva

[broadreach]

A scan of Lima newspapers this (10 Jan) evening indicate the aircraft has not been located and the search has been called off for the night. At least three helicopters and a Twin Otter have been involved in intermittent searches but mostly grounded by weather.

Chachapoyas is in the eastern foothills of the Andes and it can rain there for weeks on end. Teams totalling about 180 men headed by army and police are conducting searches on foot in extremely difficult hilly terrain with few roads. Much of it is still densely forested and wreckage just disappears beneath the tree canopy. The aircraft was approximately three minutes from landing and Lima newspapers quote the (radarless) tower staff as saying the last transmission from the aircraft was "entering base"; no indication of anything untoward.

I believe this aircraft was one of two to four F-28s purchased by the Peruvian airforce in the early 70s and operated commercially by what eventually became Aeroperu, the country's national airline. Very tough, manoueverable little birds and at the time an ideal step up from the Faucett DC-3s and -4s that served the semi-paved strips in the eastern highlands, still inaccessible to Faucett's new 1-11s.

[Tolsti]

BBC breaking news... wreckage found

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2649019.stm

[lomapaseo]

OK, another humble question. On first glance it appears that the wreckage location is high up in the mountains suggestive of CFIT, yet there was a report that the pilot radioed a mayday or Pan prior to crashing. This seems a little incongrous. As I can't recall another such call prior to a CFIT.

Comments?

[Kalium Chloride]

Mountains alone do not a CFIT make.

There's mountains all over the place on that particular flight path. Would have been quite an achievement not to hit a mountain on the way down.

It's only CFIT if the flight is under normal operational control at the time of impact.

If the pilot sent a Mayday (though I haven't seen any report of such) then it suggests that some other situation had developed prior to the accident - perhaps resulting in a loss of control.

If this is the case, the accident wouldn't be classified as CFIT. And therefore there's no contradiction.

[broadreach]

lomapaseo

I've been scanning the Peruvian internet papers fairly regularly and haven't seen anything about a mayday. Just a single last transmission, "entrando en base". They knew from the beginning the aircraft was about three minutes and nine miles from the airport, although how I'm not quite sure and the papers don't explain. In the event, it was located this morning ten miles from the airport with the help of villagers who had heard it pass low overhead and then heard a loud explosion in the direction of a hill they named.

The papers mentioned rumours of other villagers who said they had seen it pass, in flames. You have to be a bit sceptical of those comments at this stage: remote location, difficult comm links, word-of-mouth. Rumours will abound. Helicopter overflight determined the wreckage is scattered over 400m. Teams on foot had not yet been able to reach the site.

The crew were Peruvian Air Force, captain with 9,700 hrs total and 1,065 on type.

Some statistics were brought out showing that since the new airport opened and Tans began flying in there twice weekly, last year, one third of the flights have been cancelled due to weather.

The Peruvian press has been pretty balanced in their coverage, barring the usual apalling close-ups of family distress.

Just another comment on climate. Chachapoyas is close to the Equator and you'd tend to think of it as hot. News reports the temp in the evening as 2C.

[HotDog]

LIMA, Peru, Jan. 11 -- After two days of rain and fog, rescue helicopters today spotted the wreckage of a Peruvian airliner that plowed into a mountain with 46 people aboard, including eight children. Officials said there was little hope of finding survivors and that the recovery effort would be slow.

Pieces of the TANS airliner were scattered over an area 1,300 feet wide and about 1,600 feet below the peak of the mountain, Transportation Minister Javier Reategui said.

"Regrettably, there has been a direct impact against Coloque mountain," he said. "The possibilities of anyone being alive are remote."

The 11,550-foot mountain -- part of the Andes mountain range -- is 10 miles northwest of the town of Chachapoyas and about 400 miles north of Lima.

Search crews were on the ground near the site of the plane crash but were having trouble reaching it. They have to get around cliffs and push through knee-deep mud, said Juan Rodriguez, an air force colonel who is in charge of rescue operations.

Heavy rains and low clouds hampered efforts to locate the missing plane, a Fokker 28 twin-engine turbojet, which lost radio contact with the Chachapoyas airport minutes before it was scheduled to land Thursday morning. The flight had originated in Lima.

It was not raining when the plane disappeared, but low-hanging clouds covered the mountains near Chachapoyas, meteorologists said, leading to speculation that poor visibility contributed to the crash.

But medical technician Walter Abad and the mayor of Chachapoyas, Enrique Torres, were quoted by the Lima daily El Comercio as saying they had spoken with villagers near the impact site who reported seeing the plane flying low with one of its engines aflame shortly before they heard an explosion.

David Reina, fire chief of the Amazonas region, said a team of firefighters who climbed the mountain late Friday found a path the plane had cut through trees before it smashed into the mountain.

Relatives of passengers wept after officials confirmed that rescue teams had found the wreckage. Police preparing for their mission laid out dark plastic body bags near a helicopter on a grassy clearing in Lamud, a town near Chachapoyas in which the rescue operation was centered.

The plane was carrying four crew members and 42 passengers.

If in fact one engine was on fire prior to the crash, perhaps it wasn't CFIT after all.

[broadreach]

It appears to have been a CFIT. If you can read Spanish there's an article here:


http://www.caretas.com.pe/2003/1755/articulos/fokker.phtml