The 1987 Alianza Lima air disaster occurred on 8 December 1987, when a Peruvian NavyFokker F27-400M chartered by Peruvian football club Alianza Lima crashed into the Pacific Ocean seven miles from Jorge Chávez International Airport near the city of Callao. Of the 44 people on board, only the pilot survived. The Peruvian Naval Aviation Commission investigated the accident and created a report but never officially disclosed its content. Eventually, the Navy's accident report was discovered and details of it were released. In the report, investigators cited pilot error as the primary cause of the accident.
Accident
Alianza was scheduled to play a football match against Deportivo Pucallpa and had organized a charter aircraft, provided by the Air Services branch of the Peruvian Navy for the trip to Pucallpa and back. After the game the aircraft departed Pucallpa at 6:30 p.m. with Peruvian Navy Lieutenant Edilberto Villar as the pilot in command, César Morales as copilot, four cabin crewmembers and 38 players, staff and team supporters. The flight was uneventful until the crew began their descent into Lima. Upon lowering the landing gear, the left and right main gear displayed green lights, indicating down and locked, but the nose gear did not. Villar requested that Morales consult the flight manual for the proper procedure to follow. The manual was written in English and because Morales's foreign language skill was poor he read out the wrong procedure. The crew requested a fly-by of the control tower so that observers could confirm that the nose gear was down. Using binoculars the observers confirmed that the airplane was configured for landing and the crew brought the aircraft around for another attempt at a landing. While over water the aircraft flew too low and the right wing struck the surface of the ocean as the aircraft was lining up with the runway, northwest of the airport. The airliner broke up on impact and the forward fuselage sank.
Alianza lost the majority of its team as a result of the accident. Notable passengers on the flight included:
José Casanova
Luis Antonio Escobar
José González Ganoza
Alfredo Tomassini
Johnny Watson
Marcos Calderón
Aftermath
The pilot and sole survivor Villar was able to exit the aircraft from a hole in the fuselage and ascend to the surface where he was joined by soccer player Alfredo Tomasini. Villar was able to trap air in some clothing to use as a flotation devise. Tomasini was suffering from a broken leg and other injuries. The pilot and athlete floated together for hours but near sunrise the two became separated in the choppy waters and Tomasini drowned. Shortly after dawn, search and rescue teams discovered the aircraft tail section floating and rescued Villar after more than 11 hours in the water. The accident was announced to a stunned community and over the next several days some bodies were recovered from the sea.
Investigation
Following the crash the Peruvian Navy refused to make any statements concerning the cause of the accident. The Peruvian Naval Aviation Commission allowed no private investigations to take place and began its own investigation. An accident report was made but not released to the public. In 2006 producers working on a story for Peruvian television program La Ventana Indiscreta uncovered the Navy report which had been illegally locked in a Florida deposit box for 18 years. The investigation cited the pilot's lack of night flying experience, the co-pilots misreading of the emergency procedures related to the landing gear issue, and the aircraft's poor mechanical condition as contributing factors to the accident. According to the report, dated February 1988, Lieutenant Villar had logged just 5.3 hours of night flying in the 90 days preceding the accident, 3.3 of them in the previous 60 days, and had not flown at night in at least 30 days before the crash. The copilot, First Lieutenant César Morales, had logged only one hour of night flying in the 90 days preceding the accident, half an hour in the preceding 60 days, and had also not flown at night in at least 30 days. Additionally, the F27's maintenance log, which was handed to the pilot before takeoff, showed a series of mechanical defects including lacking an inertial guidance system, poor UHF radio performance, a VOR receiving unit with inadequate reception, a malfunctioning radar altimeter and a worn front landing gear indicator light switch. Lieutenant Villar initially refused to fly the aircraft out of concern for its condition. In a letter from the Fokker aircraft company, dated October 16, 1986, the manufacturer noted that Lieutenant Villar had failed a special training course which could have prevented “his disorientation while operating under pressure, the excessive demand of work in a cabin”, but was granted permission to fly the aircraft regardless. Copilot César Morales had received no flight training from Fokker.
