Investigation
Three people initially survived the crash: Alianza Lima midfielder Alfredo Tomassini, a member of the crew, and pilot Edilberto Villar. Villar declared that he escaped through a broken window and when he was swimming, he heard Tomassini was asking for help and he gave him a cylinder. He wrote in his report that Tomassini, who was an expert swimmer, showed apathy to keep swimming despite being tall and athletic. In his report, he never said that Tomassini was injured but later he told his lawyer another version in which the player had a fractured leg. By the time they were floating it was 8 p.m. and he knew that they had to resist until morning. The other survivor was a member of the crew who quit insulting the pilot then disappeared. The pilot said that the player drowned after three times that he got him out of the water. He said that he had to let him drown.
The fact that the aircraft that the team chartered for the trip was owned by the Peruvian Navy was seen as a sign of the economic weakness endured by the Peruvian military at the time, as well as the lack of organization felt throughout Peruvian football. State-owned aircraft were notorious for being in disrepair, and frequently crashed.
In 2006, Peruvian television program La Ventana Indiscreta announced that the Naval Aviation Commission charged with investigating the accident had concluded that Lieutenant Edilberto Villar's lack of night flying experience, his misreading of the emergency procedures, and the aircraft's poor mechanical condition to be contributing factors to the accident. According to reporter Cecilia Valenzuela, the complete official file containing the Commission's findings was illegally secreted away to the United States by Navy Captain Edmundo Mercado Pérez, who presided over the investigation. The file remained locked in a Florida bank vault for 19 years.
According to the findings, Lieutenant Villar had logged just 5.3 hours of night flying in the 90 days preceding the accident, 3.3 of them in the previous 60 days, and had not flown at night in at least 30 days before the crash. The copilot, First Lieutenant César Morales, had logged only one hour of night flying in the 90 days preceding the accident, half an hour in the preceding 60 days, and had also not flown at night in at least 30 days. Additionally, the F27's maintenance log, which was handed to the pilot before takeoff, showed a series of mechanical defects; Lieutenant Villar initially refused to fly the aircraft out of concern for its condition.
The report, dated February 1988, also showed that halfway through the flight from Pucallpa to Lima, the crew noted a possible malfunction of the landing gear. A cockpit indicator showed that the gear had not lowered, but CORPAC officials at Lima checked with observers on the ground, who informed the pilot that he could land safely. Villar then ordered Morales to check the emergency gear lowering procedure in the manual; the relevant page was written in English, which First Lieutenant Morales was not fluent in; he mistakenly instructed the pilot to follow step 1.3.1.7, which would flash a red indicator light, rather than step 1.4.3, which would display an orange light.
In a letter from the Fokker aircraft company, dated October 16, 1986, the manufacturer noted that Lieutenant Villar had failed a special training course which could have prevented “his disorientation while operating under pressure, the excessive demand of work in a cabin”, but was granted permission to fly the aircraft regardless. Copilot César Morales had received no flight training from Fokker.
According to some sources, the flyby of the tower caused the Fokker's fuel reserves to become exhausted, and the aircraft ran out of fuel as it was repositioning for a second landing attempt.
Read more about this topic: 1987 Alianza Lima Air Disaster