“The cursed flight of the writers”: the story of the plane whose tragic end was predicted by a passenger

38 years ago the company Avianca it was experiencing one of the worst air tragedies in its history. The cold was already beginning to invade the European continent and in Madrid the low temperatures were felt even more strongly on the outskirts of the capital, where the mythical Barajas airport is located, whose traffic passes in a large percentage through the stopovers that come and go. from Latin America to Europe.

In 1983, more specifically on November 27, a Colombian company plane covered the stretch of Frankfurt until Bogota, with steps by Paris, Madrid and Caracas. There, mostly Colombian passengers traveled, although Spaniards, Italians, French and Swedes also distinguished themselves.

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Like any route that has a stopover in different cities, the idea of ​​flight AV-011, as was its nomenclature, was to finish picking up all the travelers in Madrid to go like this to Latin America. In fact, there were writers and scholars there who went to Colombia to participate in a tribute to the Spanish literary generation of 27.

The day before the tragedy, the flight of Avianca I had canceled the trip of Frankfurt a Paris and those who had planned to get on that plane did it instead in a ship of Lufthansa. This modification generated a delay of 1 hour and 20 minutes in the takeoff of the Colombian airline’s device from the airport. Charles De Gaulle toward Madrid.

The tragic scene that was left on the outskirts of Madrid. (Courtesy ecured.cu).

The fatal stretch

It was early morning on a Sunday and the plane from the French capital was already flying over Madrid. Everything was proceeding normally, until an error by the pilots, later revealed by the black box, ended up generating the tragic impact of Flight 011 on the ground and with it the death of 181 people.

The clock read 1:06 on November 27, when Field Improved, a town located east of the metropolitan area of Madrid, a loud crash was heard, representing neither more nor less than the impact of the aircraft with the ground.

According to later reports, it all came about due to a chain of errors, which began in the negligence of the copilot, who did not correctly mark the approach height for the captain, at a time when they were already descending to face the runway.

Barajas it was barely 6.5 miles away from where the plane crashed. Before ending up slumped in parts to the ground, Avianca It collided with two hills because the pilot was flying below the minimum intercept altitude and lowered the landing gear prematurely.

The remains of the Avianca plane in Mejorada del Campo. (Courtesy ecured.cu).

The official version pointed to the pilot, Tulio Fernandez Mora, with the following words: “The cause of the accident was that the commander, without having precise knowledge of his position, he proceeded to intercept the ILS (Instrumental Landing System or beam of electronic signals that mark the path that planes must follow to land) with an incorrect trajectory, without starting the published instrumental approach maneuver, descending below all the safety margins of the area, until colliding with the ground ”.

The commander was flying almost 300 meters below what he should have and ignored the alert that the plane’s systems caused him. “Terrain, terrain, pull up!”, They said, which in Spanish means: “Terrain, terrain, go up!”.

Horror scene

That night, Field Improved it became the scene of horror, where in the midst of the cold and darkness an attempt was made to rescue and recognize the victims of the accident. Fortunately, 11 people managed to survive due to the detachment of the fuselage from the left front part of the aircraft and the opening of one of the emergency exits.

According to a chronicle of The country50-ton cranes tried to move the fuselage to rescue the victims who were still inside, but when it was tried to lift, it cracked. Such was the tumult that the tragedy had generated – which became the second worst air disaster in the history of Madrid – that even rescue tasks were complicated.

“A horrible mixture of the smell of gasoline and burnt meat, with no more light than the headlights of the Land Rovers of the Civil Guard, which only had to identify the bodies some Coca-Cola flags with the slogan The spark of life”, Later recalled the press photographer David Aguilar, who barely found out about the event, got into a taxi and went to the scene with his camera.

On that flight of Avianca who was heading to Colombia important personalities of the Hispanic American culture traveled. Among them were the authors Marta Traba, from Argentina, Jorge Ibargüengoitia, from Mexico, Manuel Scorza, from Peru, Ángel Rama, from Uruguay, and the Catalan pianist Rosa Sabater.

The cover of the newspaper El Tiempo to report on the tragedy. (Courtesy volavi.co).

The most curious thing is that some of them took their unpublished works with them. Ibargüengoitia, for example, had not left a copy of his latest book on the ground and it was burned with him. Peel He also traveled with his writings, but it had occurred to him to have another draft at home just in case.

The Argentine author was fortunate enough to be able to premiere her latest novel Anywhere earlier than the newspaper The country rated as “The cursed flight of the writers”. There, he talks about an exile who, at the end of the book, gets on a plane to return to Latin America and in his closing paragraph he says: “The plane was moving and turning. A great thunderous noise began (…). Luis threw his head back, closed his eyes and let the tears flow, until the pain passed and he fell asleep”.

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