American Airlines Flight 965

**American Airlines Flight 965** was a regularly scheduled flight from Miami International Airport in Miami, Florida, to Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali, Colombia. On December 20, 1995, the Boeing 757-200 flying this route (registration N651AA) crashed into a mountain in Buga, Colombia, killing 151 of the 155 passengers and all eight crew members.

The crash was the first U.S.-owned 757 accident and is currently the deadliest aviation accident to occur in Colombia. It was also the deadliest accident involving a Boeing 757 at that time, but was surpassed by Birgenair Flight 301 which crashed seven weeks later with 189 fatalities. Flight 965 was the deadliest air disaster involving a U.S. carrier since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

The Colombian Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics investigated the accident and determined it was caused by navigational errors by the flight crew.

## Aircraft

The aircraft was a Boeing 757-223 registered N651AA. Its first flight was on August 12, 1991, and was the 390th Boeing 757 built. The aircraft was powered by two Rolls-Royce RB211 engines.

## Flight history

### Departure

At that time, Flight 965 mainly carried people returning to Colombia for the Christmas holiday, vacationers, and businesspeople. A winter storm in the Northeast United States caused the airline to delay the departure of the airliner for 30 minutes to allow for connecting passengers to board the flight, and seasonal congestion caused further delay. Flight 965 took off at 6:35 pm EST (23:35 UTC), nearly two hours late.

The cockpit crew consisted of Captain Nicholas Tafuri, age 57, and First Officer Donald (Don) Williams, age 39. Both pilots were considered to be highly skilled airmen. Captain Tafuri had more than 13,000 hours of flying experience (including 2,260 hours on the Boeing 757/767), and First Officer Williams had almost 6,000 hours, with 2,286 of them on the Boeing 757/767.

### Going off-course

Cali's air traffic controllers had no functional radar to monitor the 757, as it had been blown up in 1992 by the terror group FARC. Cali's approach uses several radio beacons to guide pilots around the mountains and canyons that surround the city. The airplane's flight management system already had these beacons programmed in, and should have, in theory, told the pilots exactly where to turn, climb, and descend, all the way from Miami to the terminal in Cali.

Since the wind was calm, Cali's controllers asked the pilots whether they wanted to fly a straight-in approach to runway 19 rather than coming around to runway 01. The pilots agreed to approach straight-in, hoping to make up some time. The pilots then erroneously cleared the approach waypoints from their navigation computer. When the controller asked the pilots to check back in over Tuluá, north of Cali, it was no longer programmed into the computer, so they had to pull out their maps to find it. In the meantime, they extended the aircraft's speed brakes to slow it down and expedite its descent.

By the time the pilots found Tuluá's coordinates, they had already passed over it. In response to this, they attempted to program the navigation computer for the next approach waypoint, Rozo. However, the Rozo non-directional beacon was identified as R on their charts. Colombia had duplicated the identifier for the Romeo NDB near Bogotá, and the computer's list of stored waypoints did not include the Rozo NDB as "R", but only under its full name "ROZO". In cases where a country allowed duplicate identifiers, it often listed them with the largest city first. In other words, the "ROZO" waypoint should have been at the top of the FMS, as it was the nearest one, but in the case of Flight 965, it was not. Only several other waypoints that began with "R" were displayed. By picking the first "R" from the list, the captain caused the autopilot to start flying a course to Bogotá, resulting in the airplane turning east in a wide semicircle. The pilots then attempted to correct this by turning back to the south. By the time the error was detected, the aircraft was in a valley running roughly north–south parallel to the one they should have been in. The pilots had put the aircraft on a collision course with a 3,000-metre (9,800 ft) mountain. The air traffic controller, Nelson Rivera Ramírez, believed that some of the requests of the pilots did not make sense, but did not know enough non-aviation English to convey this.

## Crash

Twelve seconds before the plane hit the mountain, named El Diluvio (the Deluge), the ground proximity warning system activated, announcing an imminent terrain collision and sounding an alarm. Within a second of this warning, the first officer disengaged the autopilot, and the captain attempted to climb clear of the mountain. Within two seconds of the warning, take-off power was selected, and in the next second, pitch was increased to 20.6° upwards, causing activation of the stick shaker.

Neither pilot, though, had remembered to disengage the previously deployed speed brakes, which were fully extended and significantly reduced the rate of climb. At 9:41:28 pm EST, the aircraft struck trees at about 2,720 metres (8,920 ft) above mean sea level on the east side of the 2,700-metre-tall (9,000 ft) mountain. The last record on the flight recorder indicated that the plane was flying at 187 kn (346 km/h; 215 mph) and with a pitch attitude of almost 28°. The crash was 9.7 km (6.0 mi; 5.2 nmi) south of Tuluá VOR and 28 km (17 mi; 15 nmi) north of the approach end of runway 19 at Alfonso Bonilla Aragon International Airport. Initially, the aircraft cleared the summit, but struck the trees with the tail and crashed shortly after the summit.

Five passengers, all seated within two rows of each other, survived the initial impact, but one died two days later of his injuries. In addition to the four human survivors, a dog that had been in a carrier in the cargo hold at the time of the crash, survived the accident.