Copa Airlines Flight 201

The aircraft was a 12-year-old Boeing 737-200 Advanced registered . It had been leased to Copa from Britannia Airways just two months before the crash and held full Britannia Airways livery but with the Copa branding. The flight crew consisted of Captain Rafael Carlos Chial (53), First Officer Cesareo Tejada (25), and five flight attendants. == Accident ==

Flight 201 took off from runway 21L at Tocumen International Airport in Panama City at 8:37 pm local time as a scheduled passenger flight to Cali, Colombia, with 40 passengers and 7 crew members. At 8:57 pm, Tocumen Air Traffic Control tried unsuccessfully to make contact with the flight until it received a radio message from a KLM DC-10 aircraft that was approaching the airport, reporting that they intercepted a distress signal from Flight 201's transponder in an area between the Colombian border and Darien Province, several kilometres away from their position. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the lost plane, Tocumen ATC finally declared a full emergency in the airport and informed the Colombian ATC centre at Bogota about the missing plane. At dawn the next day, search aircraft were sent to Flight 201's last known position. After 8 hours, searchers spotted the first pieces of wreckage in the jungle of the Darien Gap. Because of the remoteness of the area and the difficulty of access, it took rescue personnel 12 hours to reach the site. Because the bodies of the victims and various parts of the aircraft's fuselage were scattered in a radius of , the recovery process was extremely difficult. After investigators reached the crash site, the investigation to find the cause of the crash began. == Nationalities of the victims ==

The aircraft was carrying 47 people: 40 passengers and a crew of seven. Fatalities included 36 Colombians, 8 Panamanians, 2 Americans, and 1 Italian. == Examination and investigation ==

The cockpit voice recorder was recovered and flown to Panama City, then to the United States, for analysis by the National Transportation Safety Board. Another factor contributing to the crash was the non-standard cockpit configurations between aircraft in the fleet of the company, including inconsistencies between aircraft and the simulators used for training. This confused the pilots about determining the setting of the ADI switches for the aircraft that was being operated at the time. Despite bearing some similarities to other incidents related to the Boeing 737 during the 1990s (such as United Airlines Flight 585), the possibility of rudder deflection in flight was discarded as a possible cause of the crash. However, Flight 201 was registered in the category of "accidents related to suspicious rudder deflection". Eyewitness accounts In the morning of the next day, Colombian and Panamanian radio stations were reporting that some residents of Tucutí and other villages nearby to the crash site said that on the night of the accident they felt a very strong explosion; meanwhile, others said that they saw a burning object that was falling from the sky towards the jungle. However, these reports were eventually dismissed by the head of Panama's civil aviation authority, Zosimo Guardia, who argued that the plane could not have exploded before crashing. ==Aftermath==

Response from Copa Airlines In the wake of the disaster, Copa gave flights to Panama City to the families of the victims; the main executive members of Copa Holdings declared a permanent emergency meeting session at the airline's main headquarters in Panama City. Copa Airlines had to strengthen its training program for flight crews: in particular, for pilots learning to fly different types of aircraft, and in several skills such as overcoming intermittent Attitude Director Indicator (ADI) errors and the ability to maintain control of the aircraft during instrument failures in adverse weather conditions. Copa also had to reconfigure the operations of its fleet via a major overhaul. The accident remains the deadliest plane crash in Panamanian aviation and Copa Airlines' history as of . In 1993, one of the relatives of Clariza Bernal Luna, one of the US passengers that were on the flight, filed a lawsuit against Copa Airlines in a Texas federal court, alleging that the airline had sold a ticket to the passenger through a travel agency in Houston, although the airline has no operations centre in Texas. The case was eventually dismissed by the court on 30 March 1994. ==Media coverage==

A year after the crash, the story of the crash of Flight 201 and its investigation was featured in a WGBH, BBC, and NDR documentary. It was screened in the United States in the PBS NOVA series as Mysterious Crash of Flight 201 on 30 November 1993, The crash was also the subject of a Season 14 episode of the Discovery Channel/National Geographic series Mayday. The episode featuring Flight 201, titled "Sideswiped", premiered in March 2015. ==See also==