The fatal crash of an Aires Boeing 737-700 on the Colombian Caribbean island of San Andres has turned the spotlight once again on airline safety in Latin America.
One person died and more than 100 were injured from among the 121 passengers and six crew when the Colombian airliner crashed while landing during severe weather on 17 August after a flight from Bogotá.
Thunderstorms were active in the area at the time and the aircraft, HK-4682, was reportedly struck by lightning as it landed at 01:50 local time. It broke into three parts on the runway. The fatality is reported to have been the result of a heart attack on the way to hospital.
The flight, Aires 8250, had left Bogotá at midnight. The captain had logged 6,784h, of which 334 were on the 737, while the co-pilot had 1,775, of which 700 were on the twinjet. A team from the US National Transportation Safety Board is assisting Colombian authorities with the investigation into the accident.
According to a source at Colombia's civil aviation authority, the flight and cockpit voice recorders have been recovered. Aires underwent a routine safety audit in July from Colombian authorities, but the carrier has never received an International Air Transport Association IOSA safety audit.
As investigators began their work into the cause of the crash, the president of the Colombian air traffic controllers' association ACDECTA, Carlos Arturo Bermudez, said in a radio interview that "several Colombian airports face severe problems". At San Andres, according to Bermudez, "the runway is in a bad state" and problems have also been experienced with the airport's radar.
Coincidentally, a joint effort between the Latin American and Caribbean airline association ALTA and the US Federal Aviation Administration in an effort to improve the region's safety record was launched this month.
While 2009 was a good year with no hull losses, 2008 was "a nightmare", says ALTA executive director Alex de Gunten, with two hull losses resulting in a safety record of 2.55 hull losses per one million sectors. This compares with a world average of 0.81 hull losses per million sectors, leaving Latin America lagging Asia, Europe, North America, the Middle East and Africa.
The first half of 2010 has seen 1.98 hull losses per million sectors, a figure that will not be helped by the latest crash. This year's first hull loss came in April when an AeroUnion Airbus A300 freighter crashed at Monterrey, Mexico.
ALTA's target is to match North America's safety record by 2014. The organisation is focusing on unstabilised approaches and runway excursions, the causes of most of the region's crashes. "It's still an area of concern," de Gunten says, referring to the accident rate. "We have a number of programmes that we are working on with the FAA and with ICAO to see how we can improve that."
Source: Flight International
