Aeroperú Flight 603
Aeroperú Flight 603 just before impact into the sea ( computer simulation)
Aeroperú Flight 603 was a scheduled flight from Lima to Santiago de Chile, on October 2, 1996, the Boeing 757-200 crashed inserted on the result of a maintenance error. There were among the 70 people on board, no survivors.
Misfortune course
Shortly after the launch of the Boeing 757-200 on the night of 2 October 1996, the pilots noticed that their primary flight instruments provided incorrect data. In addition, they warned the EICAS before partly contradictory problems, including Rudder Ratio, Over Speed , stable and Too Low - Terrain. The crew set up a distress call and asked for permission to return to the Lima airport. Believing himself to already be in a sufficient amount, the crew began the descent for the upcoming landing. Since the machine but at this time - just after midnight - was on the sea, possessed the pilots had no outside view. Furthermore, it was them by the instrument error is not possible to keep the speed, which resulted in a row to multiple stalls. Due to this, the machine also lost height quickly, but this was the pilot not appear on the at 9,700 feet "frozen" altimeters.
The machine struck about 25 minutes after the declaration of emergency on the Pacific. All 61 passengers and nine crew members were killed.
Accident investigation
The charge of investigating the crash Commission came to the conclusion that the main cause of the accident tape were the same were glued to the inlet openings of the pitot -static system previously used in the cleaning of the aircraft for protection. This system provides the barometric flight instruments in the cockpit with information on the pressure conditions. With this information, airspeed, altitude and climb or descend to the appropriate instruments are displayed. After purification forget to remove the tape again. This can be seen on the recovered wreckage yet. This led to a complete failure of the relevant flight instruments.
The disaster in the media
The catastrophe of Aeroperú Flight 603 was in the Canadian television series Mayday - Alarm shown in the cockpit with the English title Flying Blind and the German title flying blind. In re-enactments, animation and interviews with survivors and investigators reported on the preparations, the process and the backgrounds of the flight.
Related events
- Just eight months earlier, on February 6, 1996 Birgenair flight crashed 301, also a Boeing 757, due to a similar problem. In this case, debris had a pitot tube partially clogged, resulting in erroneous velocity information.