Pilots Reported Fuel Shortage 45-50 Minutes Before Avianca 707 Crash : Aviation: Investigators say all of jet’s engines were dead before it hit the ground. The condition of the fan blades is a key clue.

Investigators said Saturday that worried pilots first notified air traffic controllers that their Avianca jetliner was running low on fuel as early as 45 to 50 minutes before it crashed with all four engines stopped, killing 73 people on board.

That radioed conversation and later radio messages--coupled with stories from survivors and eyewitnesses, plus a growing weight of technical evidence--added strong support to the theory the Colombian airline’s Boeing 707 simply did not have enough fuel to land.

Lee Dickinson, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, said air controllers along the Atlantic coast ordered the plane into holding patterns for 89 minutes because of bad weather. He said NTSB investigators were trying to determine whether any of the holds were ordered after the first radio message from the crew expressing concern about low fuel levels.

Members of the NTSB gathered the new information by listening to air traffic control tapes and studying radar tapes spanning more time than the cockpit voice recorder, which was recovered from the wreckage.

Fuel Lines Checked

“About 45 to 50 minutes prior to the accident there was a communication with air traffic controllers about low fuel,” Dickinson told a late-evening news conference Saturday. He said the pilots reported “they were concerned about the fuel level being low.”

Dickinson also said that investigators had managed to examine some of the plane’s fuel lines.

“The No. 2 fuel line was intact,” he said. “We did open it up and see if there was fuel in the line. There was not.”

Investigators also sharply downgraded the amount of jet fuel previously believed to be aboard the aircraft from about 10,000 pounds to between 1,100 and 1,200 pounds--only about 150 gallons.

After its 89 minutes in holding patterns because of heavy air traffic in rain and fog, the plane was cleared for landing at New York’s Kennedy International Airport. But the crew aborted the landing because the aircraft was sinking too fast and a warning system repeatedly ordered: “Pull Up! Pull Up!”

As the plane prepared for a second landing attempt, federal officials said, the pilots again reported that they were running out of fuel or were low on fuel. The crew then told flight controllers the jet had lost two engines.

Dickinson said late Saturday that the death toll had climbed to 73, and that 66 of the bodies had been identified. He said there were 86 survivors, some still in critical condition. He said 159 people were on board, two less than the figure he had reported Friday.

Investigators also determined Saturday that none of the jetliner’s four engines were operating when it crashed. The failure of the fourth engine was confirmed after it was dug from the mud.

The inspection showed there was no damage to the fan blades, as in the case of the other three engines. If the blades had been turning, they certainly would have been damaged by debris when the plane hit, officials said.

“We found some debris, some trees, some limbs, some trunks of trees in those engines,” Dickinson said. “But there was no damage to the fan blades, which is indicating to us there was no rotation of the engines.

“If, indeed, there was rotation, you wouldn’t have trunks of wood in these engines. There would be splinters. You would see marking and damage to the fan blades, which you do not see.”

When the plane struck the hillside, it snapped off the tops of trees and the deck of a ranch-style home in this affluent Long Island community. The two residents inside were not hurt.

All day Saturday, anxious people searching for relatives continued to visit hospitals and the morgue at the office of the Nassau County Medical Examiner, where many identified the dead. One family emerged from the morgue and, using a cellular phone, tearfully told other relatives in Bogota, Colombia, their brother had not survived the crash.

Some airline pilots said that when a plane is very low on fuel and is climbing after an aborted landing, fuel may flow away from the engines, causing them to stall. Investigators also examined the possibility that the plane’s fuel-measuring instruments were inaccurate.

Barry Schiff, a veteran captain for a major airline, told The Times that even if the instruments were wrong, the flight engineer should have kept track of the amount of fuel through other computations.

“There’s simply no excuse for running out of fuel,” he said. “Even if there was something wrong with these gauges, it’s the flight engineer’s responsibility to keep track, making ongoing calculations as to the amount of fuel . . . .

“It’s difficult to imagine any set of circumstances that would explain how a pilot would run out of fuel without his simply being careless. You have to have, to be legal, enough fuel to take you from your departure point to your destination, thence make a missed approach, thence go to your alternate destination and then have additional reserve fuel atop of that. Typically it’s 45 minutes (worth of fuel).

“It’s conceivable that you may use more fuel than anticipated because of strong head winds, and you may begin to consume some of your reserve fuel. It then becomes the captain’s responsibility to land somewhere short of the destination to pick up additional fuel.”