LAM 470 Disaster

The Linhas Aereas de Moçambique flight 470 (LAM 470) crash occurred on the 29th of November 2013. The E190 was found in the Bwabwata National Park in Namibia, after it crashed mid-flight. All 27 passengers and 6 crew were killed. The E190 involved

, C9-EMC, was only a year old and had nearly 3000 flight hours. Its twin engines were inspected just one day previously.

 Crash 

On board the aircraft were 27 people. 10 of the passengers were Mozambican, 9 Angolan, 5 Portuguese and the others coming from France, Brazil and China. The crew was made of the Captain, F/O, three cabin crew and a technician. 49 year old Herminio dos Santos Fernandez captained flight 470, and was a well respected LAM Captain, with 9,000 flight hours logged. The first officer, Grácio Gregório Chimuquile, was just 24, but had roughly 1,400 hours experience. Everyone on board died upon impact in the Bwabwata National Park.

The route between Maputo International Airport in Mozambique and Luanda in Angola was a regularly scheduled LAM flight. It left Mozambique and flew over South Africa and Botswana, finally reaching Angola. LAM 470 left Maputo at 11.26 local time, and should have landed in Angola just short of 3 hours later (14.10 local time). Roughly halfway between origin and destination, at 38,000 ft, the E190 lost altitude rapidly. It was lost off radar at around 3,000ft. Last contact with made with Namibian ATC at 13.30 local time. Weather was poor at hit the time, with heavy rainfall on the flight path.

 Investigation 

Both the CVR and the FDR were sent to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the United States for readout and analysis.

On the 21st of December 2013, it was revealed that the cause of accident to be suicide by pilot. It was found that Captain Fernandes had a “clear intention” to crash the plane and changed the autopilot settings manually. The co-pilot Chimuquile left the cockpit, but Fernandes waited two minutes to lock the door, and another before descending. The NTSB pilot psychologist Malcolm Brenner said that Fernandes was probably “thinking about life” and wondering whether he could carry out the crash. The altitude was changed several times from 38,000 ft to less than 600ft, which was below ground level. The CVR heard alarms going off in the cockpit, possibly the GPWS, and the banging on the locked door of the cabin of Chimuquile. No crew member had been placed in the cabin after Chimuquile exited the cockpit, which went against LAM regulations.

Investigations of the aircraft's pilot revealed that Captain Fernandes had suffered in the years leading up to the crash. His son passed away in a suspected suicide in a suspected suicide in November 2012, almost a year to the day of the accident. Fernandes did not attend the funeral of his son. His daughter was in hospital for heart surgery at the time of the crash, and his divorce proceedings were unresolved for over a decade.

On 15 April 2016 the DAAI released its final report finding that the inputs to the auto flight systems by the person believed to be the Captain, who remained alone on the flight deck when the person believed to be the co-pilot requested to go to the lavatory, caused the aircraft to depart from cruise flight, transition to a sustained controlled descent and subsequently crash.

This disaster was not widely covered as it occurred in a “third world country”. However, a greater coverage of this crash and changes to aviation regulations would have led to a possible avoidance of another similar crash, Germanwings Flight 9525, in which the pilot Andreas Lubitz crashed the flight into the Alps due to his depression.

May those on board flight 470 rest in peace.