Sadly a simple hand held GPS would have put them plus or minus 3 feet of the runway centerline with terrain avoidance.
Unless there’s some evidence to the contrary it appears they flew on a route they didn’t have enough fuel for and then watched the gauges fall to zero before declaring an emergency.
This sums it up nicely, except to add that they very obviously had nowhere near enough fuel to fly this route safely. The flight plan has now appeared and it shows the expected time en-route exactly equal to fuel endurance!
The ATC controller appears to have performed well - audio with subtitles here. The time between the pilot declaring the plane’s “total failure - total electric and fuel” and the plane’s loss appears to have been just over a minute.
The flight’s distance to destination was 1,850 miles, slightly exceeding the specified standard range of the Avro RJ85. It’s suggested that the pilot/airline-owner didn’t call a fuel emergency earlier because that would automatically have led to an investigation and, in consequence, the airline’s license being withdrawn.
Aerial video footage of the crash site shows the plane hit a ridge, beyond which the terrain is pretty flat on approach to the runway, around eleven or twelve miles away. I wonder, if it had cleared that, if there might have been a possibility that it could have glided to the airport runway and made a landing, of sorts?
Just to address the above points about the aircraft capability with all four engines run down.
With no engine generators they have at least 30 minutes of battery power providing them with a VHF comm radio for talking to ATC, a VHF nav radio for navigating via VOR and ILS, combined standby airspeed / altimeter, a DBI (direction/bearing indicator) for heading and distance information, a standby compass, and a standby attitude indicator with ILS glideslope and localiser information.
They actually had enough equipment available to track to the airfield and fly an ILS approach without any help from ATC provided they had sufficient height to start with.
It’s not surprising though that the clowns who got themselves into that situation didn’t have the knowledge or skills to get themselves out of it.
The aircraft will glide about 2.5 NM per 1000’ With gear and flap up. They lost power at 21000’ I believe and Medellin is at 7000’, so with 14000’ available they could have made about 35 NM. Extending the landing gear reduces glide performance to 1 NM per 1000’ so you can bring it back to 32 NM assuming gear is extended at 2000’ above the ground.
They appear to have lost power about 26 NM from the aerodrome. I’m not sure if the runway was straight in or not but there may well have been an opportunity to land on the runway.
Well, sure, it’s definitely *possible *to glide to runway - it’s been done successfully several times. It does require a competent pilot(s) and a cool head, not to mention no obstacles in the way (like a ridge).
Not sure the chucklehead who planned a flight without fuel reserve would fall in that category, but perhaps his stick-and-rudder skills were better than his fuel management skills.
That speculation made sense to me, until (as I mentioned in an earlier post) I heard that audio clip. The pilot’s voice sounds so calm when, about six minutes out, he mentions his fuel “problem” – compared to its tone one minute out, after the gliding began – that I think he really didn’t know just how low on fuel he was until the last drop was gone. Maybe we’ll never know what he did or didn’t know (and what’s the probability of the co-pilot being equally clueless?).
Maybe the CVR will reveal more about this – e.g., some offhand comment a bit earlier in the flight by one of the pilots like “oh, we can’t trust this fuel gauge – it’s been acting up lately. Trust our [shitty] calculations instead.” Something like that. Or the contrary: "Remember, co-pilot, whatever you do, don’t use the word ‘emergency’ when you’re talking to ATC! ".
A lot of times, when you hear about companies/employees/owners cutting corners in business that could or do lead to bad outcomes (a recent example is Princess Cruises illegally dumping oily water in the ocean), you can sort of understand how the end justifies the means in the minds of those responsible, even though I would not behave in such a way myself. But it is beyond my comprehension how someone in the airline industry could put not only their passengers but themselves at serious risk of death. Which is what seems to have happened here, if the reports and analysis so far prove to be accurate.
I was wondering whether the plane was at absolute fuel exhaustion and was unable to clear the ridge or whether the loss of electrics/fuel compromised the pilot’s awareness of the ridge and the plane’s location relative to it, since they were flying at night.
The LaMia flight was coming in from the south. Conditions seemed acceptable for landing on runway 01.
Runway at Rionegro is more or less North-South, with Runway 01/19. Winds were minimal (< 5kts) from the east though there was rain and thunderstorms in the area.
Similar north-south runway orientation (Runway 02/20) of the airport at Olaya Herrera (downtown Medellin) but at an altitude about 3300ft lower as it sits in a valley. In the valley it is likely the winds would have been minimal. Often the weather in the valley is drier, so perhaps atmospheric conditions would have been better there as well.
Perhaps they would have made it fine to Olaya Herrera if they had asked, particularly if they requested diversion when they were initially put in the holding pattern. Unfortunately ATC can’t know what they are not told.
It’s hard to know without having a topographical chart, but I think it’s the latter. Didn’t set up for a controlled glide toward the runway and didn’t have situational awareness of the terrain. The runway certainly seems to have been within gliding distance and a glide is steeper than a normal approach so I wouldn’t have thought the terrain would have been a factor if they’d planned the glide a bit better.
A tiny bit more info gleaned… the Lamia flight made two loops in its holding pattern prior to reporting electrical problems and fuel exhaustion.
Confirmed that the in use runway was 01, so landing south to north.
Collision with terrain occurred very near the Rio Negro VOR located at N 05°58’49.8″, W75° 25′ 05.8″ The ridgeline immediately south of that VOR was what was clipped, with most of the wreckage (the most publicized photos of the scene) gouging out a path in the north facing slope of that ridge. At 0:31 time in this video you can see the proximity of the crash site to the VOR.
They almost cleared the ridges, though there were two more to the north of La Ceja that they would have needed to thread between to make the runway. Definitely not something to do at night with poor situational awareness.
Yet… people do just that.
I had a thread a few years back about a pilot from my local airport who did Stupid Flight Non-Planning and not only died himself but took a couple other people with him.
It could be a problem of massive ego.
It could be that the pilot/owner had successfully completed past flights while pushing fuel endurance to the limit but this time he didn’t get away with it.
How commonplace is it, on a flight such as this, for the pilot, rather than co-pilot, to be communicating with ATC? Apparently, it was the co-pilot’s first flight as a co-pilot.
I think there’s been some misreporting about the co-pilot. As I understand it there were three pilots. The male captain, a male co-pilot, and a female “co-pilot” who did not have a type rating on the aircraft and was along for the ride in the jump seat. Much has been made of the pretty co-pilot on her first flight but she was effectively a passenger.
As to your general question, a crew is made up of a captain and a first officer (or pilot and co-pilot if you prefer). Captain sits in the left seat and FO sits in the right seat. On any particular flight either the captain or the FO may be the person physically flying the aircraft or manipulating the autopilot. This is known as the “pilot flying” or PF. The other pilot will do radios and support the PF in various ways (selecting gear, flap, etc.) This support pilot is called the “pilot not flying” (PNF) or in some companies the “pilot monitoring” (PM). So on a particular flight the captain may be the pilot monitoring and s/he would be on the radios while the FO flies the sector. The next sector they fly they’d probably swap and the captain would fly while the FO monitors.
Well, we can take alternate fuel if we want, that’s a decision for the crew to make. It will typically mean reducing the payload, on our flights at least, so it is not normally done unless it’s a legal requirement or you have good reason to think you’ll need it. Sometimes if you want more fuel but don’t legally require it, you might take as much as you can without affecting the payload. It’s not like you have no options for the whole flight, typically you’d be able to bug out to an alternate well into the descent, so there may only be 5-10 minutes of flying where you are committed to the destination and Australian weather is mostly pretty good.
The reality is if you think you might really need to use the alternate, then you don’t just want alternate plus 30, you want alternate plus 60 or even more. You want to be able to have a couple of goes at the destination, and then go to the alternate, possibly have a missed approach there and not be worrying about eating into your fixed reserves. In this situation it may be a more convenient alternate as well, one that requires more fuel but has more support/infrastructure.
The system generally works ok, though there have been the odd crew caught out by un-forecast fog.
Colombian law requires alternate plus 10. That would not have been nearly enough to have a couple tries landing at Rionegro and then move to the designated alternate at Bogota 134 miles (216 km) away.
Which brings my other concern… there were other destinations closer than Bogota that could have been used as an alternate. The previously mentioned Olaya Herrera airport in downtown Medellin is only 12 miles (19 km) away. Periera (PEI) is 95 miles (153km) away. And Armenia (AXM) is 120 miles (193 km). All are capable of landing a 737 so a RJ85 should be no problem.
Is there any particular rationale to selecting an alternate airport that would make choosing one further away in Bogota preferable? I suppose Olaya Herrera might have been out since it was technically 5 miles beyond the maximum range of the aircraft, but it was a lot closer than other options. This was a charter operation. Not like they have a ground crew at Bogota but not the other airports.
They didn’t have an alternate at all as far as I can tell. Bogota was an en-route alternate, a place to stop along the way if you think you might need fuel or if the weather turns to poo at the destination. They didn’t have a true alternate for diversion after arriving at the destination, so the distance from the destination to Bogota wasn’t a factor in its selection, all it needed to be was somewhere along the way. If anything, an en-route alternate that is very close to the destination is of less value.
Sheesh. Leticia (LET) in the far south tip of Colombia near the Peru and Brazil border would have been better for an enroute alternate. Good runway. Can handle an Airbus A320 so a RJ85 should be fine. Refueling available. Well within range of the plane’s capabilities.
So depressing is the cascade of poor decisions and random circumstances that led to this Lamia crash.
Insufficient fuel to hold at destination with the added problem of mountains and possible weather. They had no chance except clearance for a straight in approach to land on the first try.