West Caribbean Airways Flight 708


West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 was a West Caribbean Airways charter flight which crashed in a mountainous region in northwest Venezuela in the early hours of Tuesday, 16 August 2005, killing all 160 passengers and crew on board. The plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, registration HK-4374X, was en route from Tocumen International Airport in Panama City, Panama to Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport in Fort-de-France, Martinique, France. While flying at, the aircraft's speed gradually decreased until it entered an aerodynamic stall. The crew, probably under the mistaken belief that the aircraft had suffered a double engine flame-out, did not take the necessary actions to recover from the stall. The confusion and lack of action resulted in the crash.
All the passengers were French citizens from Martinique, with the exception of one Italian, acting as the tour operator. The crew was Colombian. The flight was chartered by the Globe Trotters de Rivière Salée travel agency in Martinique. Most of the passengers were tourists returning from a week's vacation in Panama.
The 160-person death toll made the accident the deadliest of 2005, the deadliest aviation disaster to occur in Venezuela, and the deadliest involving a McDonnell Douglas MD-82.

Background

-based West Caribbean Airways started as a charter service in 1998. It specialized in flights to San Andrés in the Caribbean, parts of the Colombian mainland and Central America. A few months before the accident, the airline had been fined $46,000 for lack of pilot training and failure to log required flight data.
The aircraft involved in the incident was delivered to Continental Airlines on 4 November 1986 as N72824, which operated it until approximately 2001. At this point the airframe was put into storage in the California desert for four years, and eventually purchased by MK Aviation, a United States-based company. On 10 January 2005, the aircraft was transferred to West Caribbean Airways, and registered as HK-4374X, leased to WCA by MK Aviation.
The captain of flight 708 was 40-year-old Omar Ospina, and the first officer was 21-year-old David Muñoz. The captain had 5,942 hours of flight experience, and the first officer 1,341 hours, with 862 of them on the MD-82.

Accident

Flight 708 took off from Tocumen International Airport at 00:58 local time. It climbed initially to flight level 310, and subsequently to FL 330. The aircraft reached FL 330 at 06:44. Five minutes later, the crew turned the aircraft's anti-icing systems back on. The system uses bleed air from the engines, and this reduces the thrust they can produce. With the anti-ice system on, the highest altitude at which the aircraft could maintain level flight was reduced to. The aircraft was being flown too high for its weight and the icing conditions it faced.
The captain noticed the reduction in engine output, but he did not realize the source of the problem. Therefore, he started a rapid descent as a precaution. At that time, the airspeed was already near stall speed, and the autopilot had already compensated with a nose-up attitude of 5.8 degrees in an effort to maintain a constant height. West Caribbean, like all owners of the MD-82, had received an operation bulletin from the planes' manufacturer three years earlier, warning that the autopilot could try to compensate for inadequate speed, even allowing the speed to continue to drop towards a stall situation, without sending a warning or disconnecting; the bulletin advised pilots to simply monitor airspeed during autopilot level flight, but West Caribbean had not shared this bulletin with its pilots. Already approaching a stall condition, the airliner was pummeled by sudden turbulence, reducing the airflow into the intakes of the engines, which reduced thrust even more. The flow of air over the wing of the aircraft became stalled. Although the cockpit voice recorder picked up the first officer correctly diagnosing the situation as a stall and attempting twice to communicate this to the captain, the captain was likely confused by the unusual behavior of the engines, due to the anti-ice system and probably the air flow disruption caused by turbulence. The captain thought he was struggling with an engine flameout, which he told the first officer to communicate to the ground controller, and did not recognize the stall situation; he then mishandled the stall by increasing the nose-up attitude to an AOA of 10.6 degrees, which compounded the drop in airflow to the engines and further exacerbated the stall. In less than three minutes, the aircraft plunged from over 33,000 feet, reaching a maximum rate of descent of over, crashing belly-first and exploding at 07:01 UTC. The crash site was in a field on a cattle ranch near Machiques, in the western Zulia State, Venezuela.

Timeline

All times are UTC.
The Comité de Investigación de Accidentes Aéreos of Venezuela led the investigation into the causes of the accident. The French Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile was assigned the main responsibility for investigative analysis of the Flight Data Recorder and the Cockpit Voice Recorder, with the United States National Transportation Safety Board also taking part in recovery of FDR data. On 22 November 2005, the CIAA released an initial report suggesting that a buildup of ice inside each engine's PT2 probe was partly responsible for the accident. Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder showed that the crew discussed weather conditions, including icing, and continually requested and performed descents which is the usual response to a low power or low airspeed situation.
Analysis of the debris showed that both engines were rotating at normal speed at the time of impact, which enabled investigators to conclude that the engines had not been previously damaged, and were functioning at the time of impact. Ground scars showed that the aircraft impacted in a nose-high attitude.
The CIAA, which by then had been renamed the Junta Investigadora de Accidentes de Aviación Civil, released their final report into the accident and found the probable underlying causes of the crash to be the result of pilot error. Underscoring the finding listing pilot error as a cause, the JIAAC noted a lack of both situational awareness and crew resource management which would have better enabled the crew to properly respond to the stall and the severity of the emergency. The report stressed that the crew failed to operate the aircraft within its normal parameters. This resulted in the crew failing to recover from the stall due to poor decision-making and poor communication between the pilots. In addition, West Caribbean Airways came under criticism: West Caribbean failed to provide its pilots with the operation bulletin from McDonnell Douglas, specifically addressing the autopilot issue; failed to emphasize CRM in ongoing pilot training; created stress for its pilots by not providing regular paychecks for a period of nearly six months leading up to the accident; and further created stress for the accident crew when the airplane was delayed and almost refused takeoff at their previous stop due to West Caribbean's non-payment of catering and food service fees.

Aftermath

As a result of the crash, West Caribbean Airways was grounded by the CAEAC just one day after the crash occurred. The airline subsequently went bankrupt in October 2005.

Media and popular culture

Dramatization

The hourlong Discovery Channel Canada TV series Mayday featured the crash and investigation in a season 11 episode titled "The Plane That Flew Too High". The episode title references the fact that the cruising altitude of 33,000 feet was too high for the aircraft's weight in the weather conditions it faced.
In 2010, the documentary Panamá-Fort-de-France : autopsie d'un crash, by Stéphane Gabet and Luc David, traces the event, as well as the investigation.
A short film, Crossing Away, produced for the tenth anniversary of the Martinique-Panama plane crash, was not released until 2017.

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