For those of you who haven’t yet seen, there was a pretty major plane crash last night, involving an Avro RJ85, which was built in 1999. The plane was operated by charter airline LAMIA, and was carrying a Brazilian soccer team from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to Medellin, Colombia.
#LMI2933 was operated by a LAMIA Bolivia British Aerospace Avro RJ85, reg. CP-2933. The aircraft first flew in 1999. https://t.co/wFfgBPhilh pic.twitter.com/K0msG1GuSi
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) November 29, 2016
The plane lost radar contact at ~15,500 feet, about 30 kilometers from their arrival airport of Medellin (the airport has an altitude of about 7,000 above sea level).
Flightradar24 received last ADS-B signal from #LMI2933 at 15,500 feet – about 30 km from destination MDE airport located at ~7,000 feet. pic.twitter.com/hGcyHc98EV
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) November 29, 2016
The plane had a total of 81 people onboard (72 passengers, including soccer players and journalists, and nine crewmembers), and all but six people died.
The pilots had declared an emergency shortly before the plane crashed, allegedly due to an electrical problem. Rumor has it that the plane may have been low on fuel as well. While the weather wasn’t great, the cause of this obviously goes beyond that.
Any plane crash is terribly tragic, but the story behind this one is heartbreaking, as the team was heading to the South American Cup finals, after having performed better than they ever had before. Per CNN:
Chapecoense was set to play the Colombian club team Atletico Nacional in the first leg of the South American Cup finals Wednesday.
The team, which is ninth in Brazil’s Serie A league, has surprised many with its performance in the tournament this year — ESPNFC billed its semifinal contest as a David versus Goliath match.
“It’s a Cinderella football story. They’ve only been in the top division in Brazil for the last couple of years, and they’ve reached the Copa Sudamericana final,” Keir Radnedge of World Soccer magazine told CNN. “What they have achieved in the last couple of years was just amazing.”
Per the team’s Facebook page, here’s a video of them getting on their flight departing Sao Paulo, not long before:
https://www.facebook.com/AChapeF/videos/1502279529801128/
My thoughts are with the families and friends of everyone onboard, and here’s to hoping they find out what happened soon, so that it can be prevented in the future.
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