Soccer pain as Colombia plane crash probe starts
Print Edition
COLOMBIA’S worst air crash in two decades snuffed out a storybook run by a Brazilian soccer team, and authorities are digging in trying to figure out why a chartered jetliner crashed in the Andes, killing all but six of the 77 people aboard.
The country’s aviation agency said on Tuesday that the British Aerospace 146’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder had been found among the wreckage strewn over a mountainside and were already being studied by experts.
Initially, Colombian officials said the short-haul jet suffered an electrical failure, but there was also heavy rain when the crew declared an emergency and the plane disappeared from radar just before 10pm Monday.
Authorities also said they were not ruling out the possibility the aircraft ran out of fuel minutes before it was to land at Jose Maria Cordova airport outside Medellin, a report given to rescuers by a surviving flight attendant. Officials said they hoped to interview her yesterday.
Emotional pain resonated across the region over the loss of much of the Chapecoense soccer team from southern Brazil, which just two years after working its way into Brazil’s top league for the first time in decades had fought its way into the championship of one of South America’s most prestigious tournaments.
The aircraft, which departed from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, was carrying the team to yesterday’s first game in the two-game Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional of Medellin.
Twenty-one Brazilian journalists were traveling with the team.
South America’s soccer federation canceled all scheduled matches in a show of solidarity.
In a moving gesture, Atletico Nacional asked that the championship title be given to Chapecoense, whose upstart run in the tournament electrified soccer-crazed Brazil.
The team, from the small Brazilian city of Chapeco, was having a breakout season.
It advanced to the Copa Sudamericana finals after defeating some of the region’s top teams, including Argentina’s San Lorenzo and Independiente.
“This morning I said goodbye to them and they told me they were going after the dream, turning that dream into reality,” Chapecoense board member Plinio De Nes told Brazil’s TV Globo.
“The dream was over early this morning.”
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