Damages claims based on negligence will be enormous. LaMia's insurers (if there are any) will be liable for around USD 10 million just to pay the minimum required to the pax under the Warsaw/Montreal Conventions.

marie, your main and contributing factors will probably be mentioned in the final accident report. However, the contributing factors are totally irrelevant. The main factor is the only thing that's worth investigating and I hope it will be a thorough one! As soon as I heard that they were trying to fly a 4:22 hrs long flight in an Avro RJ85, fuel starvation immediately came into my mind.
It turns out that they had performed several earlier 4 hrs+ flights before with this RJ85.
Sorry, but I can not imagine any pilot in any serious company in Western Europe would be foolish enough to attempt a flight where he knows he will be arriving with just a few minutes fuel left.
IF(!) the investigation is done seriously, I'm sure the report will be mentioning criminal negligence, not only from the captain, but from many other people from the company. Lack of oversight from the Bolivian authorities and likely corruption are probably larger contributing factors then the one you mentioned. I know that saying this is not politically correct but anyone with a little bit of common sense will probably agree. May I suggest you let go of your political correctness and give some credit to people displaying some common sense.
The only one I feel sorry for, apart from the innocent victims of course, is Celia Castedo. If she really tried to get answers from the crew about their filed FPLN, only to be sent away, she did more then should be expected from an ARO clerk.
Let's hope that the true criminal responsables for this event fail in trying to make her the scapegoat!

I very much doubt that any AIB would conclude that.

The a/c was full of fuel so the possible extra weight would only mean a few minutes of lost range and they might have made it. But, if this pilot/airline were doing this flight on a regular basis this was always going to happen one day.

The captain was playing russian roulette, he also flew 4 other times with limited fuel onboard. One othe them flying the Argentinian soccer team from Buenos Aires to Belo Horizonte, Brazil (high traffic Class C airspace) with Messi aboard. The total flight time was 4 hours 18 min :eek:

On the battery only? I doubt it. This picture seems to show what a battery only cockpit looks like:
http://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/ima...8/15/57745.jpg

Lol, I get more indicators on my EC120B with battery power than this. I doubt that this is in ready state. I think master avionics switch 1 and 2 is off. ;-)

CDU would be on, with battery power, I am pretty sure.

let me double check this with a friend of mine that flies Avro 100

My last type had almost nothing on the battery - it's primary function was to start the APU!

This would require 7th freedom rights. Is this likely, considering 6th freedom was not granted?
(I know nothing about the Chicago Convention :confused:)

It strikes me as the revelations keep coming, that far from being a tragic case of utter incompetence on behalf of the captain/crew/company, this is growing to include-

• Dispatchers and other ground staff- if one is already seeking asylum, misguided or not, so she must have some serious fears about her own safety. The response by her own government does little to reassure, which then warrants an in-depth look at how they apportion blame and responsibility.
• Handlers- there was mention earlier about the company arriving with dry tanks previously, yet this didn't end there.
• Company owners- the surviving members, because surely this could only happen in a company whose culture is deficient at best, and utterly corrupt at worst.
• Local CAA- nepotism has already been exposed in the aftermath, but where was the oversight? How long had been operating in this way? Surely, if adequate records were kept then the signs were there previously, and if the records are a mess, that in itself warrants serious attention.
• Football team owners/management (I know next to nothing about football)- granted, concepts such as duty of care may have little meaning there, but the team has been nearly wiped out. All of the time/investment being lost. Who looked into the operating standards to ensure that the investment and assets were safeguarded?
• Football association- As above.
• The other teams who by now might well be thinking that the fun trips before were in fact a close call with disaster only minutes away. Where was the 'due diligence' on their behalf?
• Even Diplomatic relations across borders are going to be tested

With suggestions that threats had already been made towards the ATCO, this is going to be a mess, and the final outcome I suspect is going to be quite unpalatable to most.

Do you make a habit of using Airplane-Pictures.net for your systems information?

Unless there was something wrong with the aircraft other than a lack of fuel, they had the #1 VHF Nav and the #1 DBI. They also had standby airspeed and altitude. They had everything they needed in order to know where they were, where the aerodrome was, and where the ILS was.

deefer dog, I'm not saying I could've landed on the runway, just dispelling the notion that they had no nav.

Yes - reading the first 30 pages of this thread, where the reasons are given and discussed quite a few times :ugh:

No, but your comment is the first definitive statement about what services the crew would still have that I've seen here. Given that the aircraft uses engines 1 & 4 for primary generators, and a (engine driven) hydraulic system for the standby generator, and has an APU, I didn't expect to see much on the battery. There's not much in the public domain to confirm what's left.....

The question needs to be asked why the football club didn't charter a longer range aircraft to fly them directly from Chapeco airport (which has a 2475m runway) to Medellin rather than flying commercial via Sao Paulo to Santa Cruz and then booking what should have been a two leg charter. That would be 4 sectors in total which probably isn't ideal preparation for a cup final. It wasn't that the charter was cheap. From what's been published it would appear that the price of the charter was way in excess of what would be reasonable presumably due to various backhanders from the airline to officials in the football world.
It would appear that either the club were in on the scam or the Brazilian FA or CONMEBOL instructed them to use LaMia however inconvenient it was.

Battery capacity and longevity are greatly affected by how much TLC or abuse they receive in service.

Given what we now know about the operational practices of the airline in question ...

Incorrect. Regardless of your bloodlust, the primary aim for any investigation is to learn from mistakes and prevent reoccurrence. The main factor is often the easy bit and it's the contributory factors where the real learning takes place.

Where negligence has taken place, someone will need to be held accountable, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the other contributing factors :ugh:

Could write a book about that but, very briefly, there's a hughe difference between:

Relaxed and undisturbed, sorting out well ordered, hindsight immagination

and

real-time anxiety, when the brain is (pre-)occupied, sorting out lots of additional totally (ir)relevant matters. (even including matters from the (very recent) past).

All at the very same instant, whilst the clock is ticking much faster than in the 'armchair' . . .

In addition: You're also not alone, up there . . .

Among the survivors is the technician Erwin Tumiri.
Meanwhile "flight technician" Erwin Tumiri still can't accept the crash was due to lack of fuel and believes it to be faulty APU.

And there I was hoping that Erwin might be sitting in the flight deck and be privy to the fuel discussions and shed some valuable light on the chain of events. APU's tend to be faulty if they have no fuel to start up with. Does he think the APU could have replaced the engines?

It turns out that they had performed several earlier 4 hrs+ flights before with this RJ85.

There should therefore be a paper trail of the FPL's for those flights and perhaps the dispatchers alive to comment. There should also be a paper trail of the tech logs and fuel receipts after uplift to analyse those flight profiles. i.e. a history can emerge of what 'the norm' was. Then questions can be asked as to how 'the norm' was allowed to continue.

No need to start banging your head, 2 x zero!
I talked specifically about the other contributing factors that marie mentioned! (I thought that would have been clear from my previous post)
i.e.
I really don't care if lives could have been saved by declaring mayday 3 minutes earlier or if the plane was still able to make it to the airport when it became a glider. (Or if he would have made it if the other planes weren't there)
What we should be really interested in is how it became possible that this captain thought he could get away with what he did (including all contributing factors leading to that state of mind)

Allow me to suggest an aspirine for your headache. :}

I would not put too much hopes on paper trail of Fuel receipts. knowing the inflation rate and actual use of local currencies in that part of the world , fuel bills are most likely to be in US $ . Now seen the financial status of the airline I doubt they did have a fuel credit, and if they did not, they most probably have had to pay their fuel bills in cash on the spot.
Not been to Bolivia or Venezuela recently , but when I was last, when handling US $ you got a handwritten paper receipt not worth much in modern accounting, and negotiations started on how much you wanted written on it.

And the economic situation was much better then than it is now.