Apparently six passengers survived. Anyone seen any reporting as to where in the aircraft these six were seated?
Medellin news reports do not mention seating location of the surviving substitute goalie Jackson Follman. He was rescued from the wreckage at around 3am (the plane crashed around 10:15pm) and transported the a hospital in Rionegro, near the international airport that serves Medellin, and is in the ICU after surgery to amputate his right leg.
The crash site is very rural and authorities made pleas via Twitter to borrow 4x4 trucks to be able to reach the crash site. It has been raining daily and the area is quite muddy, delaying rescuers reaching the scene. By then rescuers may simply have been unable to determine where in the plane survivors were sitting. And since it was a charter flight I doubt there were specific seat assignments.
And a review of the Aviation authority press releases does not show any seating assignments.
Initially surviving were: two members of the flight crew (one flight attendant, and one technician), one member of the press traveling with the team; and three members of the team. I understand one of those players later died in hospital.
The black boxes have been recovered. The plane was a British Aerospace Avro RJ85 so perhaps the British will be assisting in retrieving data.
You might have to wait for the accident report to get the survivability stats, unless the media decide they are interesting for some reason.
The flight attendant would’ve been at the very front or rear normally, however there were a number of additional crew on the flight (along for the ride to watch the game maybe?) and they would have been seated in normal passenger seats.
What I found odd about this crash is that in one of the reports I read it said that the distance between the origin and destination exceeded the range of the aircraft, although it didn’t say that was considered as a contributing factor to the crash.
nm - had a comment, but better suited to MPSIMS new thread, going there
I guess there isn’t an MPSIMS thread. I’ll post here rather than start a new one, I guess this can be moved if necessary.
There’s strong speculation of fuel starvation. Information about possible aux fuel tanks is absent, but this route appears to be right at the limit of the range of the aircraft. This was a charter flight, so more ad hoc planning. Possibly a planned refueling stop in Bogota did not happen. A confounding factor seems to be that another incoming aircraft declared an emergency due to a fuel leak and was prioritized to land, putting everyone else on hold.
The thread above started when the reports came out, so the later comments have more up-to-date information. See post #107, purportedly a report from another aircraft waiting in the hold. Bear in mind that nothing in that thread is confirmed information.
Apparently the owner of the airline was PIC, deceased.
ETA: Also, of course, no fuel explosion in the violent crash.
There’s a thread in the game room (soccer players involved).
Thanks. News stories end up in strange places on here.
Ref - Extra airline people on board:
When we run charters to oddball destinations we sometimes bring along one maintenance guy and one cargo handling / ground ops guy. Their role is to supervise any local contractors who wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with our aircraft type or our paperwork, procedures, etc.
Bringing extra pilots would be rare bordering on unheard of. Extra flight attendants might be provisioned if the airplane is big enough or the flight long enough to warrant the extra care and feeding. That’s less rare, but still fairly rare since normally we don’t fill every seat on a charter and so the normal FA staffing gives a higher-than-normal FA to passenger ratio automatically.
We also usually carry a “charter coordinator” who’s the project manager role.
He/she was involved from the git-go in selling the charter, arranging all the logistics, meeting with the customer, etc. So that person has the total big picture on who’s supposed to do what when to who. They know all the contract details, liaison people, etc. When things start to go off the rails, as they are wont to do, having the person with all that knowledge and expertise right on-scene is *very *valuable. Back in the Olden Tymes before cell-phones and ubiquitous connectivity them being on scene was often the difference between success and failure.
Charters are high-yield business for us, but also high-risk at least as to reputation. A well-executed charter can bring in a lot of follow-on business. One that gets screwed up with diversions, wrong, bad or no food, no busses waiting at arrival, etc., will cost you that customer for life.
Which is nothing compared to the impact of a mishap. But it does explain why extra people are along. Extra people who’d be mislabeled by the media as “crew” in the heat of reporting on a disaster.
Thanks, yes sometimes you end up with a bit of an entourage. I’ve also had charters where spare seats were offered to off duty crew and their families. Very nice of the client.