AeroPeru Flight 603

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**AeroPeru Flight 603**
Summary
Date	October 2, 1996
Type	Error in maintenance
Site	Pasamayo, Peru
Fatalities	70
Injuries	0
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Boeing 757-23A
Operator	AeroPeru
Tail number	N52AW
Passengers	61
Crew	9
Survivors	0

AeroPeru Flight 603 was a scheduled Lima(LIM)-Santiago (SCL) flight, originating in Miami, which crashed on October 2, 1996.

On October 2, 1996, just past midnight, the Boeing 757 airliner crew, shortly after takeoff, reported receiving contradictory emergency messages, such as rudder ratio, overspeed, underspeed and flying too low, from the onboard computer; asked for an emergency to be declared and decided to return to base. Faced with the contradictory warnings, the pilot decided to descend. It was only when one wing touched water, almost an hour after emergency declaration, that the pilots realized how confused and disoriented they were. All nine crew members and sixty-one passengers died.

As the subsequent investigation proved, the primary cause of the crash was the masking tape left over the static ports after cleaning the aircraft (procedures required that the static ports be covered during cleaning) — an error by the maintenance crew. The static ports need to be cleared since they are particularly necessary for altitude and airspeed data. This put the pilots in a very confusing situation with conflicting and false flight data, which affected even the ability of ground radar to assist. The investigation put the responsibility on the flight deck crew since they did not react in the best possible way, and tried to return to Lima, something impossible under VFR (visual flight rules), the only way to do it without accurate data from the instruments.

Furthermore, they tried to receive guidance from the ATC. Unfortunately, the information available for the ATC was coming from the transponder of the plane itself. In other words, the information was incorrect since the source was the same that pilots had at the flightdeck.

Rumors abounded that the crash was caused by sabotage because supposedly the Peruvian Mafia wanted one of the passengers (a prisoner who was being extradited to Argentina) dead. Those rumors were never confirmed. The official leading the Peruvian investigation lost a nephew (the ill-fated flight's First Officer) in the crash. It has been stated by coroners that some passengers survived the crash but drowned afterwards. Also, it is perfectly clear that the passengers and crew were aware during their time in the air that the plane was in danger and that their lives were at risk.

Peruvian justice only sentenced the actual maintenance technician that had left the tape on the static ports, while not apportioning blame on supervisors for poor procedures and the crew for inadequate pre-flight checkups.

The Flight 603 incident contributed to the demise of AeroPeru, which was already plagued with financial and management difficulties. The airline folded in the late 1990s.

On December 13, 1999, the family members of the passengers aboard the flight, received one of the largest cash awards stemming from an airplane crash outside the United States aboard a non-U.S. carrier. According to the complaint, the control panel errors were caused by careless maintenance by AeroPeru, and negligence and defective design by The Boeing Company, the airplane’s manufacturer. The suit was filed against Boeing in federal court in Miami in May, 1997. After extensive litigation, the parties agreed to transfer the case against Boeing and AeroPeru to an international arbitration in Santiago, Chile, for a determination of the damages. The defendants agreed not to contest liability in Chile.^[1]

In the aftermath of the accident, Aeroperú had redesignated its evening Miami-Lima-Santiago Boeing 757 service as flight 691^[2]