01/12/2016 09:51 GMT | Updated 01/12/2016 11:55 GMT

Chapecoense Plane Crash: Final Words Of Pilot

The electrics had also failed on the doomed aircraft.

The final, desperate words of the pilot of a plane that crashed in Colombia carrying the top Brazilian football team Chapecoense have been revealed.

Miguel Alejandro Quiroga Murakami can be heard requesting permission to land because of “fuel problems”, as an air traffic controller explains another plane was already approaching the runway at Medellin airport and he would have to wait seven minutes.

The pilot had not formally declared an emergency at this point. As the plane circled in a holding pattern, he can be heard growing more desperate. “Complete electrical failure, without fuel,” he said in the tense final moments before the plane set off on a four-minute death spiral.


But it was too late.

Just before going silent, the pilot said he was flying at an altitude of 9,000 feet and made a final plea to land: “Vectors, senorita. Landing vectors.” The British-built BAe 146 jet slammed into a muddy mountainside just miles from the airport.

All but three members of the Chapecoense football team were killed in the crash which claimed 71 lives. Two crew members and a journalist also survived.

Rescue workers recover a body from the wreckage site of the crash

Juan Sebastian Upegui, the co-pilot on a nearby Avianca plane said he was within range to tune into the plane’s radio signal and overheard the pilot telling the controller he was in trouble.

“Mayday mayday… Help us get to the runway… Help, help... We’re going down!” he described the pilot as screaming in a leaked audio message played by local media.

“I remember I was pulling really hard for them, saying ‘Make it, make it, make it, make it,’” Upeqgui says in the recording. “Then it stopped. ... The controller’s voice starts to break up and she sounds really sad. We’re in the plane and start to cry.”

Jaime Saldarriaga / Reuters
71 people lost their lives in the crash 


Before being taken offline, the website of LaMia, the Bolivian-based charter company, said the British Aerospace 146 Avro RJ85 jetliner’s maximum range was 2,965 kilometers (1,600 nautical miles) — just under the distance between Medellin and Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where the flight originated carrying close to its full passenger capacity.

Crew member Ximena Suarez survived the crash, telling her rescuers the aircraft's fuel ran out 

“If this is confirmed by the investigators it would be very painful because it stems from negligence,” Bocanegra told Caracol Radio on Wednesday when asked whether the plane should not have attempted such a long haul.


“’We ran out of fuel. The airplane turned off,’” rescuer Arquimedes Mejia quoted Sanchez as saying as he pulled her from the wreckage. “That was the only thing she told me,” he told The Associated Press.



John Cox, a retired airline pilot and CEO of Florida-based Safety Operating Systems, said the aircraft’s amount of fuel deserves a careful look.

“The airplane was being flight-planned right to its maximum. Right there it says that even if everything goes well they are not going to have a large amount of fuel when they arrive,” said Cox. “I don’t understand how they could do the flight nonstop with the fuel requirements that the regulations stipulate.”