>"By taking the flight recorders and tape back to the U.S., they discovered, they had violated Annex 13 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, a document that lays out the rules for international air travel. It says that wherever a plane crashes, that country is in charge of the investigation. Moving evidence to a different nation could be seen as undermining that authority."
This is totally infuriating. Bureaucracy, failed diplomacy, and "national pride" are standing in the way of a safety investigation.
Instead of asking for the US and Bolivia act like reasonable adults, perhaps we can appeal to ICAO to have ICAO investigate or ask ICAO to find some way to absolve the US of any wrongdoing for investigating, given that the Bolivian government has failed to properly investigate. I'm no expert in international treaties, but there has to be some provision in the law that would not penalize a country for investigating when the other country was willfully negligent and uncooperative.
Fang Liu is secretariat general of ICAO. Perhaps lobbying her for help might produce better results.
I would suggest that the issue is not international relations, but that these two do not have any official capacity. It is hard enough to get an official response to an official enquiry.
Imagine you are the secretary at the Bolivian Embassy. Your job is to answer phones and direct queries about visa applications. You get a call from random people saying they have the flight recorder from a plane crash. You know nothing about the plane crash (it happened ~35 years ago) let alone the rules governing investigations. Best case scenario, you take the caller's details and forward it to your supervisor who is equally ignorant and has his real work to do . . . the call is forgotten, no response comes.
This sort of scenario will play out in all government departments in all countries. Until the right person on one side or the other gets interested, nothing will happen. Unfortunately, the right people tend to be very busy and have probably not even heard about this development. Even if/when they do, it is a bit of a toss up how much they'll care. This is a really old plane crash, and the investigation has been closed.
A quick Google search suggests the flight [in 1980, the word "cockpit" was used as people weren't vocal about being offended by it] voice recorder would be analog (just like an old fashioned cassette recorder?) so would be readable very easily but probably need some processing to overcome damaged sections. Exposure to UV for extended periods of time could cause serious deterioration, so reading it ASAP is probably sensible.
The flight data recorder could be more difficult but if there is a model number, more technical data would be available, again via friendly Google.
The issue with a non-official person reading is that any results are not "official" findings, so don't get official flight crash investigation status. However, since none of the official authorities in either country are interested, that's probably not important.
The only thing people should be concerned with would be if there are any criminal sanctions available if authorities get pissed off at being shown up for their lack of interest/incompetence/failing of some sort. It's standard in the US for authorities to strike back and shoot the messenger (sadly, literally in some cases).
Perhaps a low profile recovery and gentle leak of the information would be safer for those involved (e.g. tell the family members who are interested, like Judith Kelly). The internet will take care of the subsequent publication.
People are offended by "cockpit"? I've never heard of that. It only takes a few seconds to look up the etymology, which comes from coxswain -- the person in charge of steering a boat.
Assuming that they have the CVR tape, that would preclude any official investigation and piss off anyone who might be inclined to help if they managed to scramble through official channels.
Further, the CVR tape might not be spectacularly useful for a controlled flight into terrain accident in instrument conditions. There is a fair chance that the first problem the cockpit crew encountered was the impact.
On the other hand, it might show navigation equipment failures-say those VOR transmitters-and traffic control communication problems.
Speaking for myself, I found the article to be a very interesting; almost compelling read. (Didn't quite time it, but I think it took me about 25 - 30 minutes.)
I also recall: didn't Nat Geo do an episode on this on their Air Crash Investigations series?
I've read about this crash (following the recent exploration) before. One thing this article did not really delve into is the 'lizard skins' found. There was a large illicit trade in caiman skins around this time, one that Eastern were believed to be complicit in.
An article from the two explorers goes into this in more detail, and it would seem a reasonable conclusion that it was one of the driving factors of the 'cover up'. Discovery of further illegal smuggling by Eastern Airlines would have likely resulted in bans and embargoes.
https://operationthonapa.com/an-international-smuggling-ring...
Edit: A bit later, I was all the more convinced about the Nat Geo episode, so I dug up the series url[1] and looked through all the episodes of all the seasons but couldn't find it. But interestingly, the whole season 6 is somehow missing from the drop down!!! Any thoughts?
"Meanwhile, the aircraft’s other navigation system, called VOR for very high frequency omnidirectional range, relied on localized radio transmitters that told pilots only where the beacons were, not where the plane was."
I suppose that's the hazard of having an outdoor writer describing aircraft systems. VOR plus air traffic control and standard instrument landing procedures would be perfectly adequate for that approach.
On the other hand, VOR maintenance is a thing, made harder by inaccessible terrain and budgets.
Is there any reason why, over the course of 30 years, no one took a helicopter suited for that environment up there? The article mentions them trying, but bad weather preventing them from reaching the wreck. Why didn't anyone attempt again when the weather was better?
The article makes it somewhat clear that the altitude was too high for most helicopters to land and take off or hover, and that the Bolivian authorities would not allow a Peruvian helicopter that could handle the altitude participate in the search, allegedly out of pride.
Once a year or two had passed, the interest waned. An airplane with an inexperienced crew flying into a mountain while trying to land in a thunderstorm with only primitive and inaccurate navaids looks like an unfortunate accident, then and now.
Helicopters just don't work safely at that altitude. It also has persistent inclement weather conditions.
I've spent some time in La Paz, and other areas in Bolivia at high altitude. The effect in the human body is extreme. Sometimes you struggle to take ten steps up a slight gradual incline. It's insane.
La Paz and Quito are two airports I found particularly daunting to land at. Both surrounded by mountains at high altitude.
Aside from the frosty international relationship, couldn't it be that what's in that tape would point the finger against Bolivian flight controllers and the latter doesn't want it to come to light because of potential liabilities?
They didn't target the actual crash site, they targeted the ice flows downhill from the plane. Since it was a big thaw when they were there, they found a lot of recently melted stuff, including body parts which were rumored to be absent. They found magnetic tape almost certainty from the flight recorder, but due to shaky international relations and bureaucracy it's just sitting around without being analyzed.
Despite this, from their research its become increasingly obvious what happened. Bad nav, bad nav, bad weather, bad ground crew, language barrier, bad practices, and bad company policy caused the plane to come down.
this is as good a tl;dr as one will get. i tried to quickly skim the article and failed - it was just too damn interesting. I ended up reading the whole thing. it is such compelling writing, even if they think they don't have the time i urge anyone to give it the attention it deserves.
I meant to say this for a while. I'm increasingly annoyed by this "long read" format. It might be just because when I'm skimming through hn I'm looking for quick information rather than a long read. But it's at least partly because these pieces seem to have all been written by the same person. They have the same exact structure, which is probably taught in some journalism school: long winding narration, interspersed with flashbacks and side digressions, that present its subject as a suspensful adventure composed of multiple intertwining threads and leading to some unexpected discovery.
I understand that this format somehow works, but at the same time I can't escape the feeling of being served something out of an information mcdonald's, prepared and wrapped always in the same exact, proven and average way. And now when reading such a piece my brain screams "skip that stupid flashback and digression and that new character's introduction, say what you really have to say and let's end it here".
I think for me the problem is more the headline than the article. If the headline was "How the flight recorder of Flight 980 Was recovered" I would have known what the article was actually about. In this case, I was frustrated because I wanted an actual answer to the question and that didn't come until the last part and even then it was just an educated guess.
That's a pity. One of the things I loved about the pre-2000's Outside Magazine was the quality of the long-form writing. After it was clearly turning into a yuppified Sports Illustrated, I kept my subscription only for David Quammen's excellent field biology articles. Then he left. And I cancelled the subscription.
The problem is that the format you describe is employed whether or not the actual content merits the lengthy treatment. Sometimes its just a 30 second story jammed into a 10-minute container.
No, the problem is that even if a story deserves the lengthy treatment, it might not deserve this lengthy treatment. Maybe it deserves a different style, or narration. It's not that the only way to tell a long story is to start it in medias res, then digress to the summer of a few years before, then introduce a side character, then jump back to a mystery, then expand a side story a bit, then proceed a little forward on the main thread of the narration... it's just like randomly pouring salt and spices on a food to make it tastier. It would ruin the best of dishes.
I read it all for the express purpose of reporting my reading time to you guys (to contribute to the thread).
Reading fairly carefully and stopping to think wherever I wanted to (though by the end I was being less attentive) it was 20 minutes of very solid reading. That is a long time to read an article.
I think hexane's TL;DR is fine. I don't think everyone should feel like reading this whole article is the best use of their time.
Why did they do this? How do they pay rent and earn a living?
This is an unfair comment because I never met them - but I look at these expensive high-profile wanna-be high fame adventures and think these are simply people that have a lot of money and time and want to do something really cool. They even have a spreadsheet planning their next cool adventure.
IMO- imagine if their time was spent helping others instead of such high level of self gratification.
Parents who provide wealth need to provide and teach generosity and prioritize human giving too.
What an odd response. As you yourself say, "this is an unfair comment."
This is a case where dozens of human lives were snuffed out in an instant, and basically nobody ever figured out what happened. The story calls out clearly that there are friends and family still living who have lasting emotional scars. These guys donated their own time and money to investigate this incident, because they took a personal interest in learning more. Beyond that, the expedition itself was nothing to write home about -- it's not a summit of Everest, or even Kilmanjaro. Sure, I'm sure they got some enjoyment out of what they did, but is that wrong?
Finally, I don't see any sign that these guys are seeking your approval or praise for what they did, so I have a hard time understanding why you are so offended.
If you read the article, you'd have seen that they trained on their own time then took 2 weeks vacation from their regular jobs to go do this. These guys aren't (don't appear to be?) trust fund kids galavanting around the world having adventures.
