Avianca Flight 671

The aircraft itself was a Lockheed Constellation owned by Avianca, a company affiliated with Pan Am. It had 46 passengers on board and 7 crew. Four passengers, tired of waiting for repairs, left the plane while it disembarked in Miami. The disaster was the fourth major air crash in a span of four days; a Vickers Viscount crashed into a farm in Charles City County, Virginia on January 18 and killed 50, a Sud Aviation Caravelle operated by Scandinavian Airlines crashed on January 19 and killed 42, and a Martin P4M Mercator crashed into Mount Karanfil the same day, killing all 16 Navy soldiers. == Accident ==

The accident happened at about 02:24 local time, and the weather was overcast with intermittent rain. On landing, the plane made a heavy touchdown, bounced, and landed back on the runway, then skidded down the runway in flames. It came to rest upside down, from the runway threshold and to the left thereof. == Victims ==

Of the 46 occupants, 37 were killed while nine survived. along with Manuel Jiménez Díaz, known as "Chicuelo II", a famous Spanish bullfighter, his brother Ricardo, and John H. Marhoefer, president of the Marhoefer Packing Company. The nine survivors consisted of four passengers and five members of the crew. == Aftermath ==

Following the crash, the airport was temporarily closed. Reactions Governor Kenneth Blackburne expressed his "deepest sympathies" for the victims while visiting the crash site, calling it "the terrible disaster to the Columbian aircraft in Montego Bay." Investigation In the afternoon following the crash, the government of the then-Colony of Jamaica announced that they would begin investigating the cause of the crash, creating a task force headed by the Director of Civil Aviation and Inspector of Accidents, Kenneth Paton-Jones , and contacting the United Kingdom's Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation for an expert on plane crashes. ICAO report The International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) report on the Avianca Flight 671 crash stated that there was no evidence that the aircraft was improperly maintained, nor any that it was overloaded. Further, there was no hint of any technical defect that would have made it unairworthy. Its load at the time of the crash was well within the maximum permissible landing weight. However, examination of the aircraft's tire marks on the runway threshold indicated that the aircraft's sinking speed was greater than the 10 feet per second (3.05 m/s) that was deemed safe. Indeed, the flight crew found themselves on an "undesirably high flight path" only one nautical mile (1850 m) from the runway threshold, necessitating a quick descent towards the runway at Montego Bay. The rate of descent would have needed to be more than 1200 feet per minute (6.1 m/s), and would have had dire consequences had this rate been maintained until landing, as this would have been twice the safe limit (20 feet per second, as opposed to 10). The aircraft's left wing broke off, spilling aviation fuel, leading to a fire whose intensity kept firefighters from reaching the fuselage for about 20 minutes. Both the airport's own fire service and the Montego Bay Fire Brigade were summoned, but the blaze prevented them from rescuing anybody still on the plane in time. The likely cause of the disaster, according to the ICAO report, was the heavy landing, with a sinking speed well beyond the design maximum. Although the report noted that the overall responsibility for the flight's safety was the captain's, it stopped short of blaming him for the crash, pointing out that there were mitigating circumstances, such as deficiencies in training that might have led to lapses in judgement. Crew fatigue was also mentioned as a possible factor. The report included recommendations, many of which related to improving emergency exit designs and passengers' ability to open the exits. == See also ==