The aircraft used on Flight 108 was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9, which has been in service with Aeropostal for 14 years; the aircraft had been manufactured in 1976.[1]
The "Guillotine of Los Andes"
The Páramo "Los Torres" is known among Venezuelan pilots as The Guillotine ("Russian roulette") of the Andes. In a literal sense, it is a steep, usually foggy mountain that pilots had trouble avoiding before proper ground proximity warning systems were installed in planes. Prior to Flight 108, two other commercial aircraft had crashed near "The Guillotine". On December 15, 1950, an AvensaDouglas DC-3 flying from Mérida to Caracas crashed, killing all 28 passengers and 3 crew. Ten years later, on December 15, 1960, a Ransa flight crashed, killing all of its passengers.[2]
An investigation into the accident found that the cause of the crash was pilot error. The pilots inadvertently entered the wrong radial into their navigation system and went off course. Because of fog in the area, the pilots did not know they were on a collision course with the mountain.[3][4]
See also
Other wreckage from YV-23C
Santa Bárbara Airlines Flight 518 - On February 21, 2008, an ATR 42, crashed into the "Los Conejos" moor, several minutes after taking off from Alberto Carnevalli Airport in Mérida. All 43 passengers and three crew members were killed in the accident. The remains of the aircraft were found the following day in a mountain range approximately 10 kilometers northeast of Mérida at an altitude of 12,000 feet (3,700 m). After the accident, the company started a new public relations program and rebranded SBA Airlines. Like Flight 108, Santa Bárbara Airlines Flight 518 did not have accurate information of the route it was flying.[5]
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