ATR-42 missing in Venezuela

An ATR 42-300 operated by Santa Barbara Airlines is missing in Venezuela. It is several hours overdue. Witnesses have come forward saying it crashed shortly after departure, but several of them are contradictory. It departed as flight 518 between Merida and Caracas, which is a 1 hour and 45 minute flight, but never arrived. Reports say there were 43 passengers and 3 crew onboard.

An ATR 42-300 operated by Venezuela’s Santa Barbara Airlines has gone missing while on a domestic flight.

The aircraft remains unaccounted for several hours after it was due to have arrived at its destination airport. There are also unconfirmed reports that witnesses have come forward saying they saw it crash not far from the departure airport at a site 4,750m above sea level, although some of the information is contradictory.

Source

Wreckage was found 6 nautical miles from the Merida airport. From the nature of the impact no survivors are expected. The wreckage was located several miles off the flight path to Caracas.

Very Sad indeed,

It Also included a US citizen who was an employee of a Miami branch of Stanford Bank, who was there on business,

The others are thought to be Venezuelan along with 3 Colombians,

Seems there unsure of why this happened as weather was fine, also they say that then pilot knew the route very well,

My thoughts are with the familys,

link

That's a very odd accounting of what happened. There should have been a lot of communication going on between the plane and the pilots while they climbed out. And the point of impact is miles off their flight route. It sounds like he deliberately turned towards it. I'll be interested to see what the CVR has to say about it.

Things took an interesting twist today.

The passenger list included a well-known Venezuelan political analyst and relatives of a senior government official. There were no immediate reports of foreigners aboard the plane operated by local airline Santa Barbara.

www.airdisaster.com...

The FDR and the CVR have been recovered. Now they say there were 3 Columbians, and 1 US citizen onboard at the time of the crash. The tail is the only section of the plane to remain intact. Efforts to recover remains are still ongoing. They're having to land up higher and absail down to the wreckage. It's reported now that weather conditions were "normal" for that part of the country.

Hmm its interesting how they keep going back and forward of whats happening and who was on board,

The black box is going to be the key in all of this,

I wonder if we can find out who the pilot was? As said in a link he was one of the best at that route,

Santa Barbara airline's president, Jorge Alvarez, said the plane had been well maintained and had no history of technical problems.

BBC



[edit on 24-2-2008 by asala]

It would be interesting to find out. At SOME point they should release names of the people onboard. I want to try to dig into some of their history. The political connections make this rather interesting.

The investigation is likely to take 3 months according to the latest reports. A team flew in from France to help with the black boxes. According to rescuers, 95% of the remains have been recovered, but only one set has been identified so far. They were the remains of 11 year old Eisberth Quintero, the son of Alexander Quintero who is the mayor of Mucuchíes Municipality.