Thirty-five years after Avianca Airlines Flight 52 from Colombia exhausted its fuel and crashed on the North Shore of Long Island, killing 73 of 158 people aboard, the disaster’s legacy endures.

It lives in the memories of the survivors and first responders who rushed to the wreckage in a wooded area of tiny Cove Neck Village, some of whom will attend a memorial service this weekend for the Jan. 25, 1990, crash.

It lives too as a case study for young pilots, taught in flight schools and analyzed in detail in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Lessons Learned library, an online repository of scores of “safety-shaping” accidents from the last 70 years of commercial aviation.

Experts say that changes put in place after Avianca and similar crashes have improved safety for millions, though they are invisible to most passengers. They include requirements that flight crews be proficient in English, changes to air traffic control, and Federal Aviation Administration audits of the aviation authorities of foreign nations whose planes fly into the United States.

“This was a watershed,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a safety consultant and former National Transportation Safety Board investigator. “It’s one of those accidents that is held up and taught to pilots to say, ‘Do not be afraid to declare an emergency.’ ”

Flight 52 originated in Bogota and was bound for Kennedy Airport, but rain over much of the Northeast forced air traffic controllers to put the jet in holding patterns three times, adding 87 minutes to a scheduled four-hour, 40-minute flight. Finally, the jet ran out of fuel and crashed.

Jay Valdes, a retired Nassau County police officer, then a young cop working out of the Sixth Precinct in Manhasset, was called to the scene because he was the only officer at the precinct who spoke Spanish.

“As we got there, there were screams,” Valdes said this week in an interview on Tennis Court Road, near the crash site. He remembers the fuselage of the Boeing 707 broken into three parts, “sort of like a Z. The cockpit lay on the left-hand side.” He remembers a young girl, 6 or 7 years old, calling out “ ’Mi Mama’ in Spanish … she kept pointing into the fuselage.” Valdes told the girl that help was on the way and moved on to look for other survivors, he said.

Responders took pictures of the jewelry and tattoos of the unrecognizable dead, to aid in identifying them. For four days, Valdes worked the scene.

Now a deacon at The Church of Saint Dominic in Oyster Bay, Valdes said that he was preparing to deliver the homily at a 1 p.m. Sunday Mass at the church in memory of those lost in the crash. “I’m hoping to bring this message … of hope” and to “give them a little bit of peace during this difficult time,” he said.

According to the FAA analysis of the crash, it was apparent that the flight crew had concerns about weather and possibly fuel by 8:09 p.m., when they requested information about delays into an alternate airport, Boston’s Logan International Airport. After the last hold, at around 8:46 p.m., the plane’s first officer told air traffic control that the plane was running out of fuel, could hold no longer than five minutes and could not reach Boston. Shortly after 9:23 p.m., the flight crew missed its first landing approach to Kennedy. At 9:34 p.m., returning for a second approach, its engines lost power and the plane crashed

The engines flamed out because they ran out of fuel, but experts have come to understand the Avianca disaster as a problem not just of fuel management but of communication. The crash “was the first of a series in the 1990s in which accident investigators determined language had played a role in the always complex chain of events that precedes every accident,” said Elizabeth Matthews, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who studies language in aviation and helped develop the international standards of English proficiency that were adopted in 2003 in response to those crashes.

In Avianca, the flight crew talked among themselves in Spanish. Only the first officer spoke to air traffic control. Those conversations were in English. He asked for “priority” landing, said the plane was running out of fuel and could hold no longer than five minutes but never used the terms “emergency,” “mayday” or “pan-pan” — any of which would have triggered air traffic control to move Avianca up in the landing sequence or suspend other traffic to allow for an emergency landing. That was one failure, Matthews said. A second was that the captain — who repeatedly asked his first officer if he had declared an emergency — was apparently unable to monitor communication with controllers “because he wasn’t able to comprehend the first officer’s English,” Matthews said.

While the proficiency standards were a significant safety improvement, challenges remain in regulating the education industry that has sprung up around them and in teaching the everyday English that might help a multinational crew better communicate with each other, or help a young pilot better understand a flight instruction course, Matthews said.

There were other problems of interpretation in the Avianca crash. Controllers — reasonably, according to investigators — interpreted the first officer’s low-fuel warning to mean the flight had only five minutes of fuel before it needed to divert to an alternate airport in Boston, not as an emergency situation. For a controller today, a flight crew’s communication about low fuel “would raise an alarm instantly, or they would explicitly say, ‘Are you declaring an emergency, Pilot?’ ” said Michael Canders, director of the Aviation Center at Farmingdale State College.

Canders, a retired Navy helicopter pilot, said Avianca contributed to a rethinking of in-flight incidents commonly known as crew resource management that puts less emphasis on technical aspects of flight and more on group decision making, leadership and communication. “For many years, the captain was considered godlike — you don’t question them and they know what they’re doing,” Canders said. Under modern crew resource management, “crew members are not only encouraged but required to tell the captain, ‘Hey, we’re in a bad spot.’ ”

Mike Daniel, a safety consultant and former FAA senior policy manager, said Avianca spurred a number of changes: development of data link applications allowing for more efficient communication than by voice, improvements to airspace management and, crucially, to the FAA’s assessment of foreign civil aviation authorities, its counterparts in other countries.

If an audit determines that an authority does not meet international standards, flights from that country can be limited or barred from entering the United States.

“It transformed how we look at foreign airlines,” he said. Before, “there was no organized and methodical oversight.”

There were lessons, too, for Long Island’s first responders. “We learned so much about incident command communication and how to best manage these situations,” said Dr. Scott Coyne, chief surgeon for the Suffolk County Police Department, and the newly named Glen Cove Community Hospital chair of radiology in 1990. “Most people didn’t have that training at that time. It began after that. We worked in small teams and I think we were very effective in treating the survivors and triaging them.”

For survivors, peace is elusive. Astrid Lopez, then 18, once hoped to be a lawyer, but that dream evaporated. “When I have the accident, so many surgeries,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Medellin, Colombia. “My body, my mind” were damaged, she said. 

Her sister, Liliana Donlon, who lives on Long Island, added in a separate phone interview that her sister’s flight was a high school graduation present from the family.

After the crash, “she was already placed with the dead bodies at the scene and one fireman went to drop another dead body [and] they found she was moving her toes. The fireman picked up her brain from the ground … a piece of her brain. They put it on ice. The surgery went on for 20 hours,” Donlon said.

“She was unconscious for two or three months, and then she came back but she had memory of nothing. She lost everything from the past. She doesn’t remember anything about her childhood or anything. So she needed to learn to eat again, to walk again, to speak again, like a child, at 18,” she said.

“She’s 53 now. But she thinks she’s 35,” Donlon said.

Margie Lawder, of Philadelphia, was also injured in the crash. Her fiance, Miguel Olaya, was killed. She was 24 then. Now she is 59. She never married.

“No one ever has come close to what I felt for Miguel, what Miguel and I felt for each other,” she said. “No one’s ever come close.”

Thirty-five years after Avianca Airlines Flight 52 from Colombia exhausted its fuel and crashed on the North Shore of Long Island, killing 73 of 158 people aboard, the disaster’s legacy endures.

It lives in the memories of the survivors and first responders who rushed to the wreckage in a wooded area of tiny Cove Neck Village, some of whom will attend a memorial service this weekend for the Jan. 25, 1990, crash.

It lives too as a case study for young pilots, taught in flight schools and analyzed in detail in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Lessons Learned library, an online repository of scores of “safety-shaping” accidents from the last 70 years of commercial aviation.

Experts say that changes put in place after Avianca and similar crashes have improved safety for millions, though they are invisible to most passengers. They include requirements that flight crews be proficient in English, changes to air traffic control, and Federal Aviation Administration audits of the aviation authorities of foreign nations whose planes fly into the United States.

      WHAT NEWSDAY FOUND

  • The Jan. 25, 1990, crash of an Avianca airliner from Bogota, Colombia, which ran out of fuel and came down in a wooded area of Cove Neck, led to major changes in aviation.
  • Those changes include new standards for communication between pilots and traffic controllers in the declaration of a plane emergency.
  • Survivors and first responders from the crash still have vivid memories of the tragedy and will be gathering for a service Sunday at The Church of Saint Dominic in Oyster Bay to remember the victims.

“This was a watershed,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a safety consultant and former National Transportation Safety Board investigator. “It’s one of those accidents that is held up and taught to pilots to say, ‘Do not be afraid to declare an emergency.’ ”

Flight 52 originated in Bogota and was bound for Kennedy Airport, but rain over much of the Northeast forced air traffic controllers to put the jet in holding patterns three times, adding 87 minutes to a scheduled four-hour, 40-minute flight. Finally, the jet ran out of fuel and crashed.

First responders on the scene

Jay Valdes, a retired Nassau County police officer, then a young cop working out of the Sixth Precinct in Manhasset, was called to the scene because he was the only officer at the precinct who spoke Spanish.

“As we got there, there were screams,” Valdes said this week in an interview on Tennis Court Road, near the crash site. He remembers the fuselage of the Boeing 707 broken into three parts, “sort of like a Z. The cockpit lay on the left-hand side.” He remembers a young girl, 6 or 7 years old, calling out “ ’Mi Mama’ in Spanish … she kept pointing into the fuselage.” Valdes told the girl that help was on the way and moved on to look for other survivors, he said.

“As we got there, there were screams,” retired Nassau Officer...

“As we got there, there were screams,” retired Nassau Officer Jay Valdes recalled of the Avianca crash scene 35 years ago. Credit: Newsday / J. Conrad Williams Jr.

Responders took pictures of the jewelry and tattoos of the unrecognizable dead, to aid in identifying them. For four days, Valdes worked the scene.

Now a deacon at The Church of Saint Dominic in Oyster Bay, Valdes said that he was preparing to deliver the homily at a 1 p.m. Sunday Mass at the church in memory of those lost in the crash. “I’m hoping to bring this message … of hope” and to “give them a little bit of peace during this difficult time,” he said.

According to the FAA analysis of the crash, it was apparent that the flight crew had concerns about weather and possibly fuel by 8:09 p.m., when they requested information about delays into an alternate airport, Boston’s Logan International Airport. After the last hold, at around 8:46 p.m., the plane’s first officer told air traffic control that the plane was running out of fuel, could hold no longer than five minutes and could not reach Boston. Shortly after 9:23 p.m., the flight crew missed its first landing approach to Kennedy. At 9:34 p.m., returning for a second approach, its engines lost power and the plane crashed

The engines flamed out because they ran out of fuel, but experts have come to understand the Avianca disaster as a problem not just of fuel management but of communication. The crash “was the first of a series in the 1990s in which accident investigators determined language had played a role in the always complex chain of events that precedes every accident,” said Elizabeth Matthews, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who studies language in aviation and helped develop the international standards of English proficiency that were adopted in 2003 in response to those crashes.

In Avianca, the flight crew talked among themselves in Spanish. Only the first officer spoke to air traffic control. Those conversations were in English. He asked for “priority” landing, said the plane was running out of fuel and could hold no longer than five minutes but never used the terms “emergency,” “mayday” or “pan-pan” — any of which would have triggered air traffic control to move Avianca up in the landing sequence or suspend other traffic to allow for an emergency landing. That was one failure, Matthews said. A second was that the captain — who repeatedly asked his first officer if he had declared an emergency — was apparently unable to monitor communication with controllers “because he wasn’t able to comprehend the first officer’s English,” Matthews said.

While the proficiency standards were a significant safety improvement, challenges remain in regulating the education industry that has sprung up around them and in teaching the everyday English that might help a multinational crew better communicate with each other, or help a young pilot better understand a flight instruction course, Matthews said.

There were other problems of interpretation in the Avianca crash. Controllers — reasonably, according to investigators — interpreted the first officer’s low-fuel warning to mean the flight had only five minutes of fuel before it needed to divert to an alternate airport in Boston, not as an emergency situation. For a controller today, a flight crew’s communication about low fuel “would raise an alarm instantly, or they would explicitly say, ‘Are you declaring an emergency, Pilot?’ ” said Michael Canders, director of the Aviation Center at Farmingdale State College.

Firefighters attempt to get inside the midsection of the Avianca...

Firefighters attempt to get inside the midsection of the Avianca plane that crashed in Cove Neck on Jan. 25, 1990. Credit: Newsday / Richard Haro

Canders, a retired Navy helicopter pilot, said Avianca contributed to a rethinking of in-flight incidents commonly known as crew resource management that puts less emphasis on technical aspects of flight and more on group decision making, leadership and communication. “For many years, the captain was considered godlike — you don’t question them and they know what they’re doing,” Canders said. Under modern crew resource management, “crew members are not only encouraged but required to tell the captain, ‘Hey, we’re in a bad spot.’ ”

Lessons from the crash

Mike Daniel, a safety consultant and former FAA senior policy manager, said Avianca spurred a number of changes: development of data link applications allowing for more efficient communication than by voice, improvements to airspace management and, crucially, to the FAA’s assessment of foreign civil aviation authorities, its counterparts in other countries.

If an audit determines that an authority does not meet international standards, flights from that country can be limited or barred from entering the United States.

“It transformed how we look at foreign airlines,” he said. Before, “there was no organized and methodical oversight.”

There were lessons, too, for Long Island’s first responders. “We learned so much about incident command communication and how to best manage these situations,” said Dr. Scott Coyne, chief surgeon for the Suffolk County Police Department, and the newly named Glen Cove Community Hospital chair of radiology in 1990. “Most people didn’t have that training at that time. It began after that. We worked in small teams and I think we were very effective in treating the survivors and triaging them.”

Jericho firefighter Ike Goldstein comforts an injured child found behind the cockpit by...

Jericho firefighter Ike Goldstein comforts an injured child found behind the cockpit by rescue workers after the crash. Credit: Newsday / Kathy Kmonicek

For survivors, peace is elusive. Astrid Lopez, then 18, once hoped to be a lawyer, but that dream evaporated. “When I have the accident, so many surgeries,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Medellin, Colombia. “My body, my mind” were damaged, she said. 

Her sister, Liliana Donlon, who lives on Long Island, added in a separate phone interview that her sister’s flight was a high school graduation present from the family.

After the crash, “she was already placed with the dead bodies at the scene and one fireman went to drop another dead body [and] they found she was moving her toes. The fireman picked up her brain from the ground … a piece of her brain. They put it on ice. The surgery went on for 20 hours,” Donlon said.

“She was unconscious for two or three months, and then she came back but she had memory of nothing. She lost everything from the past. She doesn’t remember anything about her childhood or anything. So she needed to learn to eat again, to walk again, to speak again, like a child, at 18,” she said.

“She’s 53 now. But she thinks she’s 35,” Donlon said.

Margie Lawder, of Philadelphia, was also injured in the crash. Her fiance, Miguel Olaya, was killed. She was 24 then. Now she is 59. She never married.

“No one ever has come close to what I felt for Miguel, what Miguel and I felt for each other,” she said. “No one’s ever come close.”

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