It is accepted that fixation or overconfidence sometimes leads to unintended consequences. This was seen recently in the road accident near Mugling involving a well-respected retired bureaucrat. Had he been as law abiding as during his bureaucratic days, he would not have attempted overtaking from the left, that too on a highway. Yes, at times, we end up trailing a slow-moving, stubborn vehicle, occupying the middle of the road. Perhaps he faced a similar predicament.

With the prelude above, this piece attempts to focus on the horrendous air accident that killed almost the entire Chapoceoence football team of Brazil headed to Medellin (Colombia) for Copa Sudamericana finals. The team flew from Santa Cruz (Bolivia) for the 1605nm trip onboard the Bolivian Charter Airline LaMia.

Cumulative error

Even with improvements in various aspects of air safety globally, air accidents will continue taking place. Accidents have become progressively less frequent over the years. The most each airline and overseeing agencies can do is to identify and correct deficiencies primarily under Operations/Maintenance/Training (OMT) headings. Ideally, anomalies need to be identified in advance, but it is easier said than done. No matter how vigilant one is, someone, somewhere along the task chain, involving hundreds of people, will err sometime. Cumulated over time, it can result in a minor incident, if one is lucky, or end up as a major disaster like LaMia recently.

The aircraft used by the Bolivian Charter Airline LaMia was a British made, BAe-146 (or AVRO RJ85) able to seat a maximum of 112 flyers. Although it is the smallest passenger jet, it comes with four engines. It was conceived as a feeder airline that could easily connect the London City Airport with smaller airports in far-flung corners. Naturally, it had to have a short take-off capability and do so quietly. In fact, the first two BAe146, with two engines, were built but discarded. Engines available in the 1980s did not meet the required thrust and noise characteristics to make them viable with just two. Having found a lesser thrust engine that met both requirements, it ended up being a 4-holer. In fact, its engines are so small that it is often referred to as the only aeroplane with 5-APUs! Auxillary Power Unit is a tiny, unseen jet engine in the tail cone of all jets that provides electricity while on ground. BAe146 can quietly climb out from most small airports, including hot and high ones.

Adequate fuel

LaMia is seen to have a questionable history. It operated charter flights with a fleet of just two. One cannot help but shake one’s head in disbelief upon seeing the blatant flaw in the flight plan. It does not need an expert to see the violation there and blame a lackadaisical attitude for the accident. It showed “flight time” to Medellin and total “endurance” as exactly the same. Endurance is the duration an aircraft can remain airborne with the amount of fuel on board. That means Flt-2933 would have its fuel tank dry after 4h22min. As the said time elapsed, the aircraft ran out of fuel and it crashed, killing 71.

It is a normal practice not to blame the dead. But it is difficult not to blame Captain Quirogo. The core of the problem seems to be his callous attitude. Normally, one has to ensure that the aircraft has enough fuel (a) to the destination  (b) reasonable amount for holding in the sky, due to traffic or weather, plus (c) further fuel to be able to fly to an alternative airport, if required and (d) even have some reserve left after landing there. In other words, the flight had to have fuel well above what was needed to fly straight to the destination even under the best of times and weather.

It is quite normal for passenger liners to expect delays and no one is better placed to know this first-hand than those who fly to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport frequently. But, interestingly, there used to be an exception made for Anglo-French Concorde. It was always accorded priority for a “straight in” landing. It was not made to hold, as its 4-Orpheous engines gulped 16 gallons of fuel a minute at subsonic speeds. At supersonic speeds, it sipped just four gallons!  

Man-made mistake

As for Flt 2933, the flight dispatcher had alerted the Captain upon seeing the error. But Quirogo seems to have overruled this, saying it was okay as he would do it within time. So the safety catch was consciously ignored by the Captain himself. It is now suspected that he did so on two earlier occasions, which seems to have emboldened him to become dismissive.

But contrary to his anticipation, he was required to hold. Strangely, despite being in a ‘do or die’ situation, the Captain remained surprisingly calm and quiet. It was too late when he finally raised the alarm, as the engines, and the electricity vital for communication link and navigation, were already dying. He would have just made it, as he was barely four minutes away, if he was able to make a straight approach then. It was his fault that he did not communicate the gravity of the situation in advance and ended up wasting 13 minutes in the hold. And when he did so eventually, there was another aircraft that needed immediate landing because of an emergency.

There are similarities between the two—the air and road—accidents. In both the cases, the person in the driving seat or command seemed to have suffered from complacency. What was more tragic was that many other innocent souls perished in the accidents.

Arjyal writes extensively on aviation