The accident was the fifth most serious in August 2005, a dark month for commercial aviation, which also included, among others, the tragedies of Helios Airways Flight 522 and West Caribbean Flight 708.
Accident
Injury Map of TANS Peru Flight 204
Flight 204, carried out in a Boeing 737, left Lima's Jorge Chávez International Airport at 2:24 p.m. for a 53-minute flight to Pucallpa. At 14:52, the crew began the descent to the Pucallpa airport.
At that time, the weather conditions began to worsen, preventing a visual approach from being made. Conditions continued to worsen, however the pilots continued with the maneuver. Suddenly the plane entered a heavy hailstorm that caused the pilots to lose situational awareness and fail to abort the maneuver.
The plane finally crashed and split in two in the middle of the jungle at 15:09, just 5 kilometers from the airport.
40 of the people on the plane died. On board the aircraft were 73 Peruvians, 11 Americans, 4 Italians, 2 Brazilians, 1 Colombian, 1 Spanish and 1 Australian.
In television
Flight 204 has been the subject of a Reader's Digest story and an MSNBC documentary.[3][4] The Canadian TV series, Air Crash Investigation, has also produced an episode about the accident named "Lack of Vision".[5]
↑"Mayday Season 12, Episode 5: Lack of Vision". Archived from the original on 27 June 2014. Investigators face a major challenge when looters make off with the Flight Data Recorder from the crash of TANS Peru Flight 204. Wreckage allows investigators to rule out engine failure. But with no FDR, it will take all their ingenuity to reconstruct the final moments of the flight and figure out why the 737 crashed into the jungle, just 4 kilometers short of the runway.
