Avianca flight 052

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Avianca flight 052
Boeing 707-359B, Avianca AN0945038.jpg

An identical Boeing 707 from Avianca
Accident summary
Accident type Lack of fuel
place Cove Neck ( Oyster Bay, New York )
date January 25, 1990
Fatalities 73
Survivors 85
Injured 85
Aircraft
Aircraft type Boeing 707-321B
operator Avianca (AV)
Mark HK-2016
Departure airport ColombiaColombia Medellin Airport
Destination airport United StatesUnited States John F. Kennedy International Airport
Passengers 149
crew 9
Lists of aviation accidents

Avianca flight 052 was a scheduled flight operated by the Colombian airline Avianca from Medellin , Colombia to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City . The Boeing 707-321B used crashed on January 25, 1990 due to lack of fuel.

The accident

Weather conditions

On the day of the accident, the weather conditions in New York were very bad, which had a major impact on flight operations. Caused by a low pressure area, thick fog reduced visibility to less than 500 m. Due to these poor conditions, only limited flight operations were possible on the entire east coast of the USA. At Boston Airport alone, 53 flights were delayed that day, JFK Airport reported 99 flights as delayed and at Newark Airport there were even more than 200.

Waiting delays

Flight AV 052 took off shortly after 3 p.m. with about 41 tons of fuel (81,000 lb) after a stopover in Medellin for New York. The Avianca aircraft was a 23-year-old Boeing 707-321B with registration number HK-2016.

After AV 052 had flown over Cuba , it entered the US airspace, where it continued its flight along the east coast. Upon reaching the airspace of Leesburg (Virginia) , the crew was informed that AV 052 would initially have to fly a few holding loops . Before entering the first holding pattern at Norfolk, there were still about 8.5 tons (17,000 lb) of fuel in the tanks, which was exactly the amount previously calculated for this flight segment. The machine circled near Norfolk, Virginia for about 16 minutes before resuming its actual course. The crew inquired about the expected further delays to New York, which air traffic control indicated as expected to be 30 minutes.

Near Atlantic City , AV 052 had to fly again for 27 minutes, and another 40 miles south of John F. Kennedy Airport between 29 and 46 minutes over the intersection CAMRN.

Altogether, the holding patterns resulted in almost 1½ hours of additional flight time (89 minutes). At 8:44 p.m., while on hold via CAMRN, the Avianca crew informed air traffic control that the alternative destination Boston was no longer an alternative destination due to the small amount of fuel available.

Missed approach

First officer Mauricio Klotz repeatedly reported to air traffic control that the machine was running out of fuel, but did not explicitly state that it was an emergency. 20:47 AV 052 ended the queues and began the ILS - approach for landing on runway 22L at JFK Airport in New York, for which she at 21:15 from the Tower got permission to land. On its final approach , the aircraft got into severe winds and fell to an altitude of less than 500 feet (150 meters), well below the planned glide path . The aircraft narrowly avoided an impact on the ground, whereupon the approach had to be aborted (21:23 hrs) and given full thrust again. In the following, Klotz was instructed several times by Captain Caviedes to explain an air emergency. Klotz did not follow this instruction, but merely repeated to air traffic control that the fuel was running low; however, he claimed to Caviedes that he had declared an air emergency. When air traffic control assigned AV 052 a heading north-east and the crew asked whether they still had enough fuel to move 15 miles from the airport, Klotz gave a positive answer and failed to address the worsening fuel problem again to point out.

The crash

Seat overview

At 21:32, a few minutes after the missed approach , engine 4 initially failed - engine 3 a short time later. Ultimately, due to the lack of fuel, the remaining engines also failed, whereupon the machine went into gliding flight. The plane hit the ground in Cove Neck, in a hilly area about 25 kilometers from the airport. As a result of the strong impact, the cockpit was separated from the fuselage of the machine and thrown 30 meters through the air, where it collided with a building. Due to the empty tanks, the wreck did not go up in flames, which had a positive effect on the passengers' chances of survival. The landing gear of the Boeing was not extended at the time of the impact.

Of the 149 passengers and 9 crew members, 85 survived, of which only one passenger was in the first class with six people. All occupants in the cockpit were killed by the impact.

Due to the high acceleration forces on impact, most of the victims had severe internal injuries. Death resulted from head injuries and injuries to the upper body.

Investigations into the accident

When the flight data recorder was examined by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), it turned out that the storage medium, a metal foil that could only be written on once, had been used up before the flight and, contrary to the regulations, had been affixed with an adhesive strip. The flight data recorder was not functional and no data could be obtained. A recording lasting around 40 minutes was reconstructed from the tape of the cockpit voice recorder , which contained important information on communication between the crew and air traffic control.

The NTSB's final report came to the following conclusions:

  • The cause of the crash was the failure of all four engines due to lack of fuel. There was no evidence of any other malfunction of the engines or other system components.
  • The crew had no current weather report for either the destination or the alternate airport. She did not request this at any time.
  • The selected alternative airport was already unsuitable at the time of take-off due to the weather conditions.
  • The flight plan did not take into account the latest data and assumed an incorrect total weight when taking off from Medellín.
  • The crew was adequately trained and had sufficient experience. The first officer , who was used for all communications with the air traffic controllers , spoke English well enough.
  • After taking off from Medellín, there was no contact between the crew and the Avianca dispatcher , although this was not mandatory either.
  • The crew did not adequately communicate the fuel shortage to the air traffic controllers. The first officer was mistakenly assumed that his request for "priority" ( priority ) as "emergency" message ( emergency was understood), the word "emergency" was used by him at any time. The master had difficulty understanding the conversations between the first officer and the pilots.
  • The pilot's reaction was appropriate for a priority situation.
  • The landing approach was not carried out correctly by the master, which was partly due to the weather conditions at the time of landing, which were worse than predicted. Other pilots make successful landings under the same wind conditions.
  • The air traffic management of the Federal Aviation Administration FAA was unable to manage effectively able to traffic at JFK airport, leading to extreme delays and holding patterns caused. In particular, arrivals from departure airports outside the USA and the possibility of missed approaches were not sufficiently taken into account.
  • The cabin crew and the passengers were not warned of the impending crash ( brace ). The cause of the serious and fatal injuries were blunt violence during the impact. The emergency slides could not be used due to the lack of emergency slide rails.

Importance of communication

The communication between the crew and air traffic control prior to the crash was cited as an example of cultural differences. Due to a subjective hierarchical subordination of the crew of the machine it was omitted to declare an express emergency. This has been analyzed extensively in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers in the context of other plane crashes due to communication problems.

The accident in the media

The aircraft accident involving Avianca flight 052 was shown in the Canadian television series Mayday - Alarm im Cockpit with the English title Deadly Delay and the German title Tödliche Verspätung . In simulated scenes, animations and interviews with bereaved relatives and investigators, reports were made about the preparations, the process and the background of the flight.

Similar incidents

swell

  • Deadly Delay , documentary from the series AIR CRASH INVESTIGATION , National Geographic, 2005 (USA)
  • Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers . 2008, ISBN 978-3-593-38838-0

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e Avianca Flight 52: The Delays That Ended in Disaster - New-York Times , by John H. Cushmann Jr., New York Times, February 5, 1990
  2. ↑ a b c 25 January 1990 - Avianca 52 - tailstrike.com - Evaluation of the cockpit voice recorder
  3. ↑ SA Dulchavsky, ER Geller, DA Iorio: Analysis of injuries Following the crash of Avianca Flight 52. In: The Journal of trauma. Volume 34, Number 2, February 1993, pp. 282-284, PMID 8459471 . - Analysis of the injury from the crash of Avianca 052 (Department of Surgery, Division of Trauma, State University of New York, Stony Brook)
  4. ↑ a b 1990-1-25Aircraft Accident Report ( English ) National Transportation Safety Board . Retrieved August 6, 2015.

Coordinates: 40 ° 52 ′ 48 "  N , 73 ° 29 ′ 43"  W.