MEDELLIN, Colombia — The pilot of the chartered plane carrying a Brazilian soccer team told air traffic controllers he had run out of fuel and desperately pleaded for permission to land before crashing into the Andes, according to a leaked recording of the final minutes of the doomed flight.
In the sometimes chaotic exchange with the air traffic tower, the pilot of the British-built jet requests permission to land because of “fuel problems” without making a formal distress call. A female controller explained another plane that had been diverted with mechanical problems was already approaching the runway and had priority, instructing the pilot to wait seven minutes.
As the jetliner circled in a holding pattern, the pilot grew more desperate. “Complete electrical failure, without fuel,” he said in the tense final moments before the plane set off on a four-minute death spiral that ended with it slamming into a mountainside Monday night.
By then the controller had gauged the seriousness of the situation and told the other plane to abandon its approach to make way for the charter jet. It was too late. Just before going silent, the pilot said he was flying at an altitude of 9,000 feet and made a final plea to land: “Vectors, senorita. Landing vectors.”
The recording, obtained Wednesday by Colombian media, appeared to confirm the accounts of a surviving flight attendant and a pilot flying nearby who overheard the frantic exchange. These, along with the lack of an explosion upon impact, point to a rare case of fuel running out as a cause of the crash of the jetliner, which experts said was flying at its maximum range.
The six survivors were recovering in hospitals, with three in critical but stable condition, while forensic specialists worked to identify the victims so they could be transferred to a waiting cargo plane sent by the Brazilian air force to repatriate the bodies.
Alfredo Bocanegra, head of Colombia’s aviation agency, said that while evidence initially pointed to an electrical problem, the possibility the crash was caused by lack of fuel has not been ruled out.
One key piece to unlocking the mystery could come from Ximena Sanchez, a Bolivian flight attendant who survived the crash and told rescuers the plane had run out of fuel moments before the crash.
“We ran out of fuel. The airplane turned off,” rescuer Arquimedes Mejia quoted Sanchez as saying as he pulled her from the wreckage. “That was the only thing she told me,” he told The Associated Press.
In a four-minute recording circulated on social media, Upegui described how he heard the flight’s pilot request priority to land because he was out of fuel. Growing ever more desperate, the pilot eventually declared a “total electrical failure,” Upegui said, before the plane began to lose speed and altitude.
“I remember I was pulling really hard for them, saying ‘Make it, make it, make it, make it,’” Upeqgui says in the recording. “Then it stopped… The controller’s voice starts to break up and she sounds really sad. We’re in the plane and start to cry.”
No traces of fuel have been found at the crash site and the plane did not explode on impact, one of the reasons there were six survivors.
However, there could be other explanations for that: The pilot may have intentionally dumped fuel in the hopes of reducing the risk of a fireball in a crash, or the aircraft could have suffered a fuel leak.
John Cox, a retired airline pilot and CEO of Florida-based Safety Operating Systems, said the aircraft’s amount of fuel deserves a careful look.
“The airplane was being flight-planned right to its maximum. Right there it says that even if everything goes well they are not going to have a large amount of fuel when they arrive,” said Cox. “I don’t understand how they could do the flight nonstop with the fuel requirements that the regulations stipulate.”