HOW did this plane VANISH over the AMAZON?? Varig 254

on the night of September 3rd 1989 a Boeing 737 carrying 54 passengers and crew simply vanished Into Thin Air over Brazil the aircraft was in perfect working order the weather was calm and the pilots had been talking to air traffic control the fight was supposed to take less than 45 minutes yet the aircraft never reached its destination to this day the incident is shrouded in mystery yet the few facts that are known paint a picture so shocking that it is frankly hard to believe this is the story of varic flight 254. [Music] on the evening of September 3rd 1989 48 passengers boarded a varic Airlines Boeing 737 up mariba in the north of Brazil they were Bound for the city of Belen a short 40-minute Journey North the flight had originated in Sao Paulo earlier that day and had made five stops before landing in maribyr a few minutes previously the fight to bellem near the mouth of the Amazon River would be its final leg of the day this video is sponsored by World of Tanks World of Tanks is a highly realistic online PC game with over 100 million players worldwide it's free to play and you can choose from over 600 tanks of all different types including destroyers artillery light medium and heavy tanks so there's always a new way to play there are more than 40 different battle arenas you can play on meaning you can drive your tank across Open Fields and deserts climb steep hills sneak through forests and even play your matches in urban or industrial zones these tanks are historically accurate and the vehicle movement and characteristics make you feel like you're inside a real tank what I like about this game is that no tank stays the same you can earn experience and modify and upgrade your tank so that it's ready for even the harshest of battles use the first link in the description to download World of Tanks and use promo code tankmania to get a free premium account for 7 Days 250 000 credits premium tank Excelsior as well as three rental tax for 10 battles each all for free that's promo code tankmania which I've provided in the video description you can also check out World of Tanks merch on Amazon the store link is in the description the captain of this flight was 32 year old Cesar Augusto Padula Garces he had flown for the Brazilian Air Force for a number of years before joining varic in 1982. in his time as a pilot he had accumulated just under 7 000 hours of flying experience almost a thousands of which were under 737. while he set the aircraft up for departure that evening 28 year old first Officer Nelson de Souza zile who's outside the plane carrying out the walk around zile had joined varic just over a year ago and was very new to flying he had just 800 hours of experience in total half of which ran the 737 [Music] the aircraft they were flying the Boeing 737-200 was the Workhorse of varick's domestic Fleet it was safe and reliable and the particular aircraft being used for this flight was 14 years old this was the Pilot's Last Flight of the day and they were expecting to touch down at Bellum Before Sunset yet as they set up the cockpit for departure they made one crucial mistake this mistake and the crew's failure to recognize it would soon endanger the lives of everyone on board at half past five that evening flight 254 pushed back from the gate at maribat and taxied out to the runway many of the passengers were eager to make it to bellem quickly because that evening the Brazilian football team was playing Chile to determine which country would take part in the 1990 World Cup before long however the outcome of that match would be the last thing on their minds their short flight would soon turn into a desperate fight for survival at just after half past five captaingar says lined up with the runway and powered up the aircraft for takeoff [Music] all was well in the cockpit as flight 254 climbed up to its cruising altitude of 29 000 feet [Music] given how short this fight was the aircraft would only be staying at that altitude for a few minutes before beginning its descent into belem during the climb first officer zile tried to determine the plane's exact position by tuning the radio frequency of Belen's navigational Beacon known as a VOR into his instruments but when he tuned the frequency the needle on his horizontal situation indicator didn't move this wasn't unusual however in 1989 Aviation infrastructure in Brazil was patchy at best it was possible that the beacon was down for maintenance or that it simply wasn't working the pilots continued their climb unperturbed within a few minutes the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude of 29 000 feet high above the Amazon rainforest with every passing minute the mistake the pilots made at the beginning of the flight was compounding yet they were completely oblivious to this as their planes sped out over the jungle before long it was time to begin the descent into badam the first officer radioed bellamere traffic control to request permission to descend however he got no response he tried again a few more times and still received no response this was strange and the pilots began to wonder whether they had an issue with the radio equipment when zla still received no response after multiple attempts he switched from his VHF or very high frequency radio to his HF or high frequency radio which has a longer range sure enough this worked only he got through not to the air traffic controller at Belen but to an aeronautical Information Services officer in a separate room to the controller as it turned out the controller only had a VHF radio so could not pick up the cruise calls on the HF radio this wasn't too bad though the information serves as officer simply passed on the cruise request to descend and the controller then cleared them down to twenty thousand feet by this point the pilots had an inkling that something must be amiss but they couldn't put the pieces together their navigation radios appeared unable to pick up the bellam radio Beacon and their VHF radios couldn't get through to the controller was there something wrong with their radios yet strangely the crew could talk to other aircraft which were on the way to bellam no problem it was only the controller who they couldn't get through to a few minutes later the aircraft reached its cleared altitude of 20 000 feet and leveled off the airport or at least the city of Berlin should have been in sight by now but the pilots couldn't see it their view of the ground was somewhat obscured by the smoke Rising off the rainforest from the slash and burn agriculture but still they should have been able to see the City by now according to their rudimentary onboard computer known as the performance management system the total distance they had flown had now exceeded the distance from marabar to Belen and with every passing minute the chances that the crew would spot the city in front of them got smaller and smaller what's more air traffic control couldn't Point them in the right direction because they had no radar the pilots were on their own eventually after their computer told them they had exceeded the planned trip Distance by 30 miles Captain Garces decided that the airport could not be ahead of them he figured that they must have overflown it and that they had simply failed to spot it because of all the smoke he did a 180 degree turn aiming to approach the airport from the other side meanwhile first officer zile told air traffic control that they would be turning around he also requested clearance to descend to four thousand feet as this would give them a better chance of spotting the airport Air Traffic Control granted this request and the crew began their descent as the plane descended the pilot scanned the landscape around them for any sign of the city of belem but all they saw was the vast stretch of rainforest extending out to the Horizon in all directions in the main cabin the passengers were growing impatient they should have been on the ground by now what was taking so long a sense of unease now permeated Flight Deck why was this airport proving so hard to find the first officer was still trying to pick up a signal from the bellam radio Beacon and when his instrument still showed no sign of moving he tried something rather unorthodox he tuned the plane's radios to a commercial radio station based in Bell M called ratio guajara he was hoping that he would be able to use the plane's automatic direction finder or ADF to pick up the direction of the radio signals he got a weak signal from the station which was broadcasting a football match but it wasn't reliable as a navigation Aid next he tried a different radio station also based in Belen called radio liberal the signal from this was much better and the pilots could hear that it was broadcasting a Sunday mass the automatic direction finder seemed to hone in on the signal much more definitively too things were now looking up for the crew another hopeful sign came when the captain spotted a large river at his windscreen in this region of Brazil any river that wasn't the Amazon was likely a tributary of it and since bellam was very close to the Amazon River the crew figured that if they followed this River they would end up near the Amazon and therefore near belem they were doubly reassured by the fact that the ADF needle also pointed down the river So at around half past six that evening as the plane continued its descent to four thousand feet the captain turned the aircraft to the right and began following the river a few minutes later the plane had reached 4000 feet at this height there would be no missing the city Captain gar says continued following the river as it snaked Through the Jungle waiting for the lights of bellem to come into view the ADF needle kept pointing down the river towards the transmitter for radio liberal minutes passed and then some more minutes but still the city was nowhere to be seen in the Pitch Black Knight the captain lost sight of the river and pointed his onboard weather radar down towards the ground to follow its path if there weren't so many passengers in the back the situation would have been comical here were two qualified pilots flying low over the jungle at night using their weather radar to follow a river with their navigation equipment tuned to a commercial radio station trying to make their way to their destination was the improvisation at its finest or at its worst but the pilots could not see the humor in their situation they were now growing increasingly concerned if they had flown past bellem and then turned around they should have seen it by now yet this River seemed to snake on endlessly and there was still no sign of civilization out the windscreen was Pitch Blackness as far as the eye could see where were they how could they be flying towards the radio station at bellem for this long without reaching the city unbeknownst to the pilots the radio station they were picking up was not in fact radio liberal but rather it was another station with the same frequency radio Brazil's Central hundreds of kilometers to the south of Belen it was technically out of range of the aircraft it was so far from it as to be Beyond or beneath the horizon but an unfortunate Quirk of physics meant that the pilots still picked up its signal as it turned out the radio waves from the transmitter of radio Brazil Central were bouncing off an electrically charged layer of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere hundreds of kilometers above the Earth's surface they were then reflected back down towards the ground and picked up by the aircraft so the ADF needles the pilots had been following had never been pointing towards Berlin the entire time they had been pointing towards the city of barro De Garces far to the south of their position but the pilots didn't know this they were clinging onto their ADF needles hoping that they would lead them to safety they simply weren't willing to entertain the possibility that all this time they had been chasing a phantom [Music] in the cabin the passengers knew that something had gone badly wrong This was meant to have been a short flight why were they still in the air well over an hour and a half after takeoff the flight should have landed Before Sunset with every minute they spent in the air the pilots were using our precious fuel and at the low altitude of four thousand feet where the air is thicker and more thrust is required to push the aircraft through it the plane was using fuel much more quickly than it would have at a high altitude the mood in the cockpit was now tense Air Traffic Control couldn't help the pilots as they had no radar and this being 1989 there was no GPS or any high-tech way of determining their position the crew were completely on their own with nothing but a few analog navigation instruments to fix their position in the Darkness and now they were running out of time they had to find out where they were fast the pilots began routing through their flight documents trying to find any sign of where they might have gone wrong then to their astonishment they finally saw their mistake and it was incredibly basic after taking off from maribyr they had flown Due West instead of due north where bellem was all this time they had been heading in completely the wrong direction deep into the Amazon rainforest the reason for their mistake was shockingly simple as it turned out shortly before this flight the captain had been on holidays during his break the airline had changed the way it presented headings on its flight plans the flight plan which the pilots had printed off that evening stated that the heading after departure was zero two seven zero a nonsensical heading given that headings can only have three digits as they can only go as high as 360 degrees naturally the captain had interpreted this as a heading of 270 degrees and that's what he said in the horizontal situation indicator at the outset of the flight when the first officer had come back into the cockpit after the walk around part of his duties involved independently reviewing the flight plan and setting up the navigation equipment appropriately he either made the same mistake as the captain or else just saw what the captain had put in his instrument and copied it both Pilots had put 270 degrees which is due West into their instruments in aviation the sheer amount of numerical data handled by pilots flap settings altitudes speeds fuel loads radio frequencies descent rates stopping distances visibilities Runway numbers air pressures headings all of these numbers can cause Pilots to be sucked into a world of data and to lose touch with the basic reality around them which is that they're flying a plane if either pilot had applied Common Sense while setting up the aircraft they would have realized that Westerly heading made no sense if there was supposed to be flying North to belem this would have led them to realize that the flight documentation was specifying a heading of 0 to 7 degrees not 270 degrees but for whatever reason neither pilot noticed that they had set the plane up to fly West after takeoff instead of North in order to distract them as odd as they climbed up to the cruising altitude that they were flying towards the Sun it was evening time when they Departed if they were flying towards belem the Setting Sun would have been after the left-hand side the fact that it was in front of them meant that they had to be flying West but this never occurred to the crew [Music] sitting in the dark cockpit hours later these realizations hit the pilots like a ton of bricks they had just made the gravest mistake of their careers perhaps of their lives they had gotten themselves lost and they were now wandering around aimlessly at night low on fuel in the middle of the Amazon rainforest now it all made sense the radio beacons they couldn't find the air traffic controllers who couldn't hear them the airport that seemed never to show up they had flown out west deep into the Amazon rainforest and out of range of belem air traffic control and of the airport's navigational beacons [Music] and there was another terrible implication the river they had been following for the last hour was not a tributary of the Amazon but an entirely different River the jingu river they had been burning fuel at a massive rate flying at four thousand feet for more than an hour as they followed a completely different River than the one they thought they were following at this point a sense of dread filled the cockpit what would the pilots say to the passengers they had committed an almost unforgivably basic mistake one which they'd failed to notice even as the evidence of their mistake mounted and glaring evidence in the case of the Sun they were now completely lost and running out of time if they couldn't figure out where they were quickly they would run out of fuel and come crashing down into the dense jungle below in a last-ditch effort to locate their position Captain Garces told the first officer to search for charts of the area in the piles of papers at the back of the cockpit Zelo went to search for these and meanwhile the captain began climbing the aircraft up to 8 500 feet this climb would achieve two aims first the thinner Air at higher altitude would reduce the plane's fuel consumption buying the pilots some time second from a higher vantage point they would be in a better position to see airports and cities and to track radio beacons but after searching a cockwit the first officer was unable to find the charts he and the captain then began trying to track the radio stations both at maribyr where they took off from ankara's another airport which they suspected would be close to the massive relief of both Pilots when they tuned into these frequencies the ADF needles swung into life both pointed roughly South Southeast the captain notified air traffic controller belem that they were flying towards karachas and would be landing there the controller told them that the airport had already closed for the night but that he would send somebody out to the Airfield to meet them finally it was beginning to look like they would make an airport but again the pilots had unknowingly made a fatal error when they tuned their radios to the beacons at maribyr and Caracas they failed to listen to the morse code identifier which those beacons transmitted which sounded something like this if they had listened closely they would have realized that the signals they were receiving were in fact not from these beacons but from two other beacons hundreds of kilometers to the South like the signals from the commercial radio stations before them they were theoretically out of range but had bounced off the ionosphere High open the atmosphere and were being reflected down to the aircraft a combination of denial confirmation bias and sheer bad luck had now sealed the Pilot's fate [Music] they were desperately following the only instruments which told them that they were going in the right direction and they were following them deeper and deeper into the rainforest as the minutes ticked on there was still no sign of the airport out the windscreen mile after mile the fuel quantity dropped and still there was nothing but Blackness outside gradually the pilots began to lose hope in a few minutes they would run out of fuel and there would be nothing to stop them from crashing down into the Amazon rainforest [Music] there was very little the pilots would be able to do to make such an accident survivable Captain gar says notified air traffic control that they would be making a forced Landing in the jungle he then got on the public address system and told the passengers that his navigation instruments had malfunctioned and that the aircraft would shortly be making a crash landing in the rainforest some passengers began praying While others rushed to the galley and began getting their hands on as much beer and Spirits as they could there was pandemonium on board and the flight's final minutes the pilots were completely resigned to their fate by this point in the dead of night with no way of seeing the ground beneath them they would not be able to pick a landing site it was entirely a matter of look where they ended up the pilots watched anxiously as the fuel gauges near zero and sure enough at nine o'clock that night the left engine lost power less than a minute later the right engine famed out as well without engines the plane lost electrical power and all of the pilots instruments stopped working apart from a few small standby instruments the aircraft was now nothing but a glider drifting steadily downwards from an altitude of 8 500 feet the 54 passengers and crew would have less than five minutes before meeting their fate in the rainforest the pilots lowered the flaps this would enable them to fly slower and thus reduce the impact forces when they hit the trees but because they had lost engine power they had lost most of the hydraulic pressure which Powers the flaps this meant that they were only able to extend the flaps to 10 degrees if they had extended the flaps while the engines were still running they would have been able to extend them further but In the Heat of the Moment it didn't occur to the pilots to do this because of this their speed would be about 60 kilometers per hour faster than it could have been which would make for a more violent crash as the plane descended towards the dark abyss of the rainforest Garces and zile tried to keep their AirSpeed at around 150 knots which was just above stall speed keeping the aircraft as slow as possible was the only chance they had at saving lives with no way to see the ground beneath them they wouldn't be able to make their descent shallower as they near the ground traveling at over 250 kilometers per hour it would all be over in an instant and nobody on board would see it coming the pilots watched helplessly as the altimeter Unwound like a clock going back to zero then without warning the plane crashed through the rainforest canopy its wings were torn off by trees and the fuselage began to buckle and tear within a few seconds the mangled wreck of the aircraft had come to a stop incredibly almost everyone on board had survived the crash the impact with the trees had actually slowed the plane down more gradually than a direct impact with the ground would have done and because there was no fuel on board there was no explosion or post-impact fire in fact many of the passengers escaped the wrecked aircraft with only minor injuries the pilots too survived the crash initially nobody knew where the plane went down Air Traffic Control did not have radar and the pilots had no idea where they were it wasn't until two days after the crash when a group of passengers trekked through the jungle and Came Upon a farm that they were able to alert authorities as to where the plane had crashed the survivors were all rescued and the investigation into the accident then began in all 42 of the 54 occupants survived the crash 12 people died here's a map of the route the fight should have flown and here's the approximate route that it actually took this here is where the pilots turn back around after thinking that they had overflown Belen and then follow the river to the point of fuel exhaustion to this day it remains a mystery why the crew took so long to pick up on their initial mistake some have speculated that they had been listening to the World Cup qualifying football match on the radio during the flight and were distracted though there is no hard evidence for this the cockwood voice recorder only recorded the final 30 minutes of the flight when the pilots were already well and truly lost in any case investigators determined that the Pilot's handling of the situation once they realized they were lost was poor rather than climbing to a high altitude and trying to use a variety of radio beacons to triangulate their position they climb to just 8 500 feet and tune their navigation radios to a set of beacons whose Morse code identifiers they didn't check what's more after the crash investigators located the charts in the cockpit which the first officer had tried looking for hadzile managed to find these charts he would have seen that there was an airport nearby which the pilots had enough fuel to make it to but for reasons which will never be known Zila never located these charts it's worth pointing out that months after the accident the flight plan flight 254 used was shown to 21 Pilots of major airlines around the world during a test conducted by the International Federation of airline pilots associations in this test 15 of the 21 Pilots made exactly the same mistake that Garcia's anzile had made on that fateful day what's less clear is whether these Pilots would also have failed to notice this mistake after first making it why the crew of flight 254 didn't pick up on the fact that a Westerly heading would not take them to bellem is anybody's guess after the accident varigan stole more modern navigation systems in its aircraft both Garces and zile were charged with unconvicted of negligence and sentenced to four years in prison they ended up receiving community service instead Garcia's lost his pilot's license and why Zillow kept his few Airlines were willing to hire him in the end the tragic story of flight 254 is a lesson in the importance of vigilance and even common sense in the cockpit these days more advanced navigation equipment and improved Aviation infrastructure around the world have thankfully made accidents like this a thing of the past but the lessons of fight 254 remain as important as ever foreign I'd like to thank the patreon and YouTube members for helping to make this video possible if you enjoyed this video please consider supporting the channel for as little as 3 euro per month I've put the links for that on the screen here I'd especially like to thank Joey and Steve Wilcox for the very generous support Green Dot Aviation now has a Discord server so if you'd like to join a growing community of people discussing all things Aviation just tap on the link in the video description and I'll see you there thanks again for watching and I'll see you soon for the next episode

Channel: Green Dot Aviation

Views: 1,058,331

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Id: kIqy5eUQFsM

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022