Pilot pleaded to land after he ran out of fuel
The pilot of the plane carrying a Brazilian soccer team and others told air traffic controllers he had run out of fuel and pleaded for permission to land before crashing in the Andes of Colombia.
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.
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.
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.
No traces of fuel have been found at the crash site and the plane did not explode on impact, one of the reasons the six people survived.