Aircraft crashed in Colombia after taking off from a
Bolivian airport amid reports of 'electrical problems'
Early reports suggest there are just five survivors from the
crash including three Chapecoense players
The team were set to play Copa Sudamerica tournament final
on Wednesday as part of a fairy tale season
A plane carrying 81 people - including a top Brazilian
football team forced to change flights at the last minute - has crashed in
remote Colombian mountains amid reports just five have survived.
Brazilian side Chapecoense were on their way from Bolivia to
Medellin International Airport in Colombia to play in the Copa Sudamerica final
when the jet came down.
The footballers had to change their flight and board the
doomed aircraft after Brazilian aviation authorities prevented them from taking
a charter plane, it has been claimed.
Defender Alan Ruschel, 27, goalkeepers Jakson Follmann and
Danilo and a Brazilian journalist are reported to be among just five survivors
from the crash after being pulled alive from the wreckage.
The Avro RJ85 plane, which was carrying nine crew, crashed
at about 10.15pm after suffering power failures while flying through the
mountainous Antioquia Department. Local officials said it crashed against a
hill and broke in two.
As officials revealed 25 bodies had already been recovered,
rescue teams were forced to suspend their operations amid heavy rain in the
mountainous region.
he team, from the small city of Chapeco, was in the middle
of a fairy tale season. It joined Brazil's first division in 2014 for the first
time since the 1970s and made it last week to the Copa Sudamericana finals -
the equivalent of the UEFA Europa League tournament - after defeating
Argentina's San Lorenzo.
May God accompany our athletes, officials, journalists and
other guests travelling with our delegation' the club said in a brief statement
on its Facebook page. The players looked happy and relaxed as they waited for
permission to board.
The mayor of La Ceja, a nearby town, said on local radio,
citing firefighters, that at least 25 people had been killed in the crash and
about five survivors had been rescued - but few official figures were yet
available.
Ambulances ferrying survivors to hospital can only get to
within 30 minutes walk of the spot where the plane has crashed near the town of La Unión, it has emerged.
Rescuers on foot are having to stretcher survivors through
fog which prevents them from seeing a few feet in front of them, local radio
reported. They are then put into lorries which drive them another 700 metres to
the waiting ambulances.
The pilots and cabin crew on board the plane that crashed
were all Bolivian while most of the 72 passengers were Brazilian and about 40
were part of the Chapecoense delegation.
They included 20 players, the manager Caio Junior and four
other members of his coaching team including an assistant manager, a personal
trainer, a kinesiologist and a masseur who is said to be among the survivors.
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Medical staff from the San Juan de Dios hospital transfer
27-year-old Brazilian footballer Alan Ruschel after he as pulled alive from the
wreckage of the crash
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The club's president and vice-president were also on board
along with other club managers. The team were only about five minutes from
their destination when they crashed.
Some of the lorries are getting stuck in mud which is making
the rescue more difficult. Witnesses said they have seen five people rescued so
far.
Hypothermia is another concern for those who have survived,
because it is only five degrees Celsius. Nearby hospitals have been placed on
'maximum alert' and are preparing for injured passengers to be treated.
Video shared on Twitter claimed to have captured the exact
moment the hort-haul plane, operated by
a charter airline named LaMia, dropped from the radar. Shocking images also
show the mangled wreckage of the plane's wing.
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The Chapecoense football team are pictured here on a plane.
The footballers had to change their flight and board the plane that crashed
after Brazilian aviation authorities prevented them from taking a charter
flight, it has been claimed
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Flight tracking service Flightradar24 said on Twitter the
last tracking signal from flight 2933 had been received when it was at 15,500
feet, about 19 miles from its destination, which sits at an altitude of 7,000
feet.
The Avro RJ85 was produced by a company that is now part of
UK's BAE Systems. A civilian aviation
database website says that the plane that it made its first flight on March
1999.
Statistics from planespotters.net show that the regional
plane has had several owners since.
From 1999 to 2007, it was owned by Mesaba Aviation in the
U.S. before it was transferred. The plane has been in the hands of Bolivian
airline LAMIA since October 2013.
British Aerospace, which is now known as BAE Systems, says
that the first 146 plane took off in 1981 and that just under 400 - including
its successor Avro RJ - were built in total in the U.K. through November 2003.
It says around 220 of are still in service in a variety of
roles, including aerial firefighting and overnight freight services.
There are reports that the plane was 17 years old and that
the team had taken the charter flight out of Bolivia when Brazilian aviation
authorities barred the club from chartering a Bolivian plane direct from Sau
Paulo to Medellin.
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Defender Alan Ruschel, 27, and goalkeepers Jakson Follmann
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Instead they had to take a commercial flight to Santa Cruz
de La Sierra in Bolivia, where they got the plane that crashed, reports in
Brazil have claimed.
Hugo Botero Lopez, mayor of La Union, told Colombian
newspaper El Tiempo: 'There are firemen from La Union, Rionegro, El Carmen de
Vibroal, La Ceja, there are more than 90 lifeguards, but it is not easy to get
people who are alive.'
It's a tragedy of huge proportions,' Medellin's Mayor
Federico Gutierrez told Blu Radio on his way to the site in a mountainous area
outside the city where the chartered aircraft is believed to have crashed
shortly before midnight local time.
Local media in Colombia are reporting that a male passenger
has arrived in an ambulance to a hospital near Medellin.
Blu Radio said the passenger arrived on a stretcher with an
oxygen mask and covered in a blanket. He appeared to be alive.
'Tonight it was reported that a plane coming from Viru Viru
airport in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which should have landed at Jose Maria Cordova,
airport had gone off course,' a Colombian rescue official, Mauricio Parodi,
told reporters.
Rescue teams, from firefighters to disaster management
officials, have been pressed into the search for survivors, added Parodi, the
director of disaster managment for the province of Antioquia.
Poor weather conditions made the crash site accessible only
by road, airport authorities at Medellin, where the plane was scheduled to
land, said on social network Twitter.
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