Aviation offifficials targeted in fatal soccer plane crash

Questions raised about how out-ofrange flflight got OK.

RIO NEGRO, COLOMBIA — Victims of this week’s tragic air crash in the Andes were flflown home Friday as Bolivia’s president called for “drastic measures” against aviation offifficials who signed offff on a flflight plan that experts and even one of the charter airline’s executives said shoul d neve r have b e e n attempted.

The move by President Evo Mora l e s c a me a f t e r evidence emerged that the pilot reported the plane was out of fuel minutes before it slammed into a muddy mountainside, killing all but six of the 77 people on board. Among the dead were players and coaches from a small-town Brazilian soccer team that was headed to the fifinals of one of South America’s most prestigious tournaments after a fairy-tale season that had captivated their soccer-crazed nation.

As an honor guard played taps early Friday, members of Colombia’s military loaded fifive Bolivian crew members who died in the crash onto a cargo plane for the trip back home.

Later in the day, caskets containing the remains of 50 Brazilian victims, many draped with sheets printed with their team’s green and white logo, began the journey to the Chapecoense club’s hometown in southern Brazil. The bodies of 14 Brazilian journalists traveling with the team and two passengers from other South American nations were being sent home on separate flflights.

Bolivian flflight crew member Erwin Tumiri became the fifirst of the survivors to be released from the hospital. Before leaving, he recorded a cellphone message thanking his rescuers and the medical staffff who treated him.

The f a rewell s c a me a s details surfaced of possible negligence and unsettling family ties between the Bolivian-based charter company LaMia and the country’s aviation agency, which approved the ill-fated flflight Monday between Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and Medellin, Colombia, even though it exceeded the short-haul jet’s maximum flflying range.

Attention was focused on a former Bolivian air force general, Gustavo Vargas, who is one of LaMia’s owners and whose son headed the offiffice responsible for licensing aircraft in Bolivia’s civil aviation agency. The younger Vargas was suspended Thursday along with several other high-ranking aviation offifficials.

One o f t h e s u s p e n d e d officials, Marcelo Chavez, the regional director of the agency that controls air traffific in Bolivia, said an inspector pointed out irregularities in the airline’s flflight plan, including the fact that the aircraft’s fuel capacity was barely enough to flfly directly to Medellin. Chavez said the airline decided to go ahead with the flflight anyway and air traffiffic controllers had no authority to prevent them.

On Thursday, the airlines’ operations director told an Argentine radio network that he also had disapproved of the flflight plan.

“I wouldn’t have f l own direct,” Marco Rocha said.