Miracle in the Jungle

William Ralston | The Atavist Magazine |January 2024 | 1,513 words (6 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 147, "Mayday."

1.

Hernando Murcia was the kind of pilot who flew routes others wouldn't dare. Murcia worked for Avianline Charters, one of the air taxi companies that shuttle people across Colombia's Amazon region, a pristine expanse of rainforest roughly the size of California. The forest is dark, dense, and often treacherous. There are no roads, much less commercial airports. The meandering rivers have strong currents and teem with predators, including piranhas and anacondas. Jaguars prowl the banks.

Violent rebel groups and drug smugglers are known to hide out in the region. Otherwise it's sparsely populated. The people who do call the Amazon home are mostly members of indigenous tribes, and they rely on privately chartered flights to reach the outside world.

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To take these flights is often to risk death. Landing strips used by Avianline and other companies are no more than makeshift clearings of dirt and gravel amid thick vegetation; many of the sites fail to meet the safety standards of Colombia's Civil Aviation Authority. Thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, and strong winds are frequent. Because Colombia does not set an age limit for aircraft, the small propeller planes that fly the Amazon's routes are often so old that they don't have autopilot or other modern safety features. Pilots must be alert to rattles and to odors that don't seem right. To navigate, they must rely on instinct shaped by experience. The skies over the rainforest are plagued with radio blind spots, requiring pilots to travel long distances without any contact with the ground.

None of this bothered Murcia. The 55-year-old had been piloting small airplanes in Colombia for more than 30 years, working for Avianline since 2021. He was willing to fly through torrential rain, even though it could crash a prop plane in a heartbeat. Once, in 2017, the aircraft he was flying experienced engine failure, and he managed to make an emergency landing on an unfinished road, saving the lives of his passengers.

On April 30, 2023, Murcia agreed to pilot a flight from the southern Amazon town of Araracuara to San José del Guaviare, a population center more than 200 miles to the north that is connected to Colombia's road network. His aircraft would be a blue and white Cessna 206 with the registration number HK2803. The plane was manufactured in 1982, but it had only been operating in Colombia since 2019. Before that it accumulated thousands of flight hours in the United States. In 2021, prior to being purchased by Avianline, HK2803 had crashed. No one on board was seriously injured, but damage to the propeller, engine, and a wing required extensive repairs before the plane could be put back in service.

Murcia was late to arrive in Araracuara because a storm delayed his incoming flight, so the HK2803 trip was moved to the next morning, and Murcia stayed in town overnight. Before going to bed he called his wife, Olga Vizcaino, to tell her that he loved her. He asked her to give their daughters a hug for him. Early the following day, Murcia sucked down some coffee, scrambled eggs, and plantains, then made his way to the Cessna to carry out his usual preflight inspection.

HK2803 was supposed to be carrying representatives from a company called Yauto, a broker of carbon credits between indigenous populations and multinational firms. But sometime before takeoff, members of the Colombian military stationed in Araracuara approached Murcia. They told him that there was a change of plans: He needed to evacuate an indigenous family who feared that a local rebel group wanted them dead.

As the family hurried into the rear of the Cessna's cabin, a local indigenous leader named Hermán Mendoza clambered up front next to Murcia; he said that he was there to ensure the other passengers arrived at their destination safely. Murcia added everyone's names to the flight manifest, radioed the information to Colombian air traffic control, then revved the plane's engine.

At first the Cessna wouldn't budge. The recent downpour had turned Araracuara's landing strip into mud, and the plane's wheels were mired. As Murcia fought to free the aircraft, one of its wheels hit a divot, tilting the plane so much that the propeller bumped the ground. Finally, just before 7 a.m. on May 1, he managed to take off.

The skies were blue that day, and there was a light wind. For around half an hour all was well. But as the Cessna approached Caquetá, a Colombian department that contains one of the densest, wettest, most remote corners of the Amazon, something went wrong. Over his radio, Murcia declared engine failure.

"Mayday, mayday, 2803," he said. "My engine is idling. I'm going to look for a field."

Air traffic control pointed him toward nearby landing strips and reported the emergency to the Colombian Air Force, but then the Cessna's radio signal cut out. Fifteen minutes later it returned, and Murcia reported that the engine was working again. But not for long: Eight minutes later, Murcia was back on the radio.

"Mayday, mayday, 2803, 2803, my engine failed again," he said.

The Cessna was no longer flying—it was gliding. Murcia needed an opening in the landscape below him, somewhere he could set the plane down and search and rescue could find it. But in the Amazon, such openings are exceedingly rare. In emergencies some pilots aim for a bushy tree; if an aircraft's velocity is sufficiently reduced and its nose remains lifted on impact, the foliage can sometimes cradle a plane until help arrives.

Instead, Murcia decided to shoot for water. "I'm going to look for a river," he said. "Here I have a river on the right." Air traffic control asked him to confirm his location. "One hundred and three miles outside of San José," Murcia responded. "I am going to hit water."

These were the last words air traffic control heard from Murcia. Moments later, radar recorded the Cessna taking a sharp right turn. Then, around 7:50 a.m., it disappeared.

Neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest's canopy. All they saw was a seemingly endless sea of green.

Word of the Cessna's disappearance spread quickly. In Bogotá, the Search and Rescue Service of the Colombian Civil Aviation Authority reviewed the plane's last known coordinates and calculated the maximum distance it could have glided before crashing. This provided a broad area of interest for a recovery mission.

By 8:15 a.m., authorities had picked up a distress signal from the plane's emergency locator transmitter, a device triggered by impact from a crash. The ELT would also broadcast approximate GPS data every 12 hours until its battery died, which would happen after two days. The Cessna appeared to be somewhere in an area of around 1.5 square miles, near a small community called Cachiporro along the Apaporis River. Maybe that was where Murcia had attempted his water landing.

When a plane crashes in Colombia, the responsibility for finding it normally lies with the Civil Aviation Authority, which will arrange for both the military and the air force to dispatch recovery teams. But the vast wilderness and unique dangers of the Amazon meant that it was initially deemed too risky to send anyone on foot. Only the air force was deployed, and it sent surveillance planes over the jungle near Cachiporro, hoping to spot the wreckage or possibly survivors.

There was reason for hope. People had survived crashes in the Amazon before, in Colombia and elsewhere. Most famously, in 1971, a 17-year-old named Juliane Koepcke fell from an altitude of more than 10,000 feet after lightning struck LANSA flight 508. She walked alone for 11 days in the Peruvian jungle before being rescued.

As the Colombian air force got to work, Freddy Ladino began organizing his own search for HK2803. Ladino, 40, with a shaved head and pearly white teeth, is the founder of Avianline. By 10:30 a.m. the day of the crash, the company had sent up several of its other planes to look for HK2803. But neither Avianline nor the air force saw any sign of the crash: no debris, no smoke, no conspicuous swath cut through the rainforest's canopy. All they saw was a seemingly endless sea of green. Searchers would have to take another approach, and fast.

As Colombian authorities and Avianline regrouped, the families of the passengers aboard HK2803 received word that their loved ones were missing. Murcia's wife was at home with her daughters when she got the call. She prayed that her husband was alive and decided to keep the television turned off. The crash was already making headlines, and she didn't want to get caught up in speculation.

The last-minute change to the HK2803 manifest supercharged the media's interest in the crash. The indigenous family on the flight included a woman named Magdalena Mucutuy Valencia (34) and her four young children: daughters Lesly (13), Soleiny (9), and Cristin (11 months), and son Tien (4). Within hours of the Cessna vanishing, the fate of Magdalena and her children became an obsession in Colombia. International interest followed. In the weeks to come there would be breathless news segments, finger-pointing, misinformation, and dashed hopes. It would be 40 days until the world had answers.

Read the full story at The Atavist