Avianca Pilot’s Urgent Plea Not Relayed

The pilot of a low-on-fuel Colombian jetliner radioed air traffic controllers that the plane needed a “priority” landing, but his urgent plea was never relayed to the radar facility responsible for guiding the aircraft to Kennedy International Airport, investigators said Sunday.

Members of the National Transportation Safety Board said they discovered the critical lapse in communications after interviewing air traffic controllers and studying transcripts of recorded conversations between the doomed Avianca Boeing 707 jet and ground personnel.

Just as the plane was completing its last holding pattern south of New York City, the crew notified controllers in the New York Center that it was low on fuel and needed to land quickly. But officials said the radio message went no further.

“That message was not passed on,” said an official of the safety board.

“If there was information at New York Center, it should have been passed on to New York TRACON,” Lee Dickinson, an NTSB member, told a late evening news conference after a day of examining possible causes of the crash that killed 73 people, including the cockpit crew.

20 Still Critical

Of the 86 survivors, 20 remained in critical condition on Sunday.

Dickinson said traffic controllers told investigators there was a “critical” controller shortage Thursday night when the plane smashed into a hillside in this suburban community.

The NTSB member said the last plane before the Avianca flight approaching Kennedy was an American Airlines jet, whose pilot radioed he had only 14 minutes of fuel and “had to declare an emergency.”

Dickinson said one of the controllers interviewed at TRACON--the Terminal Radar Approach Control Facility in Garden City, N.Y.--told investigators: “It was an intense evening. The weather was bad. They had a shortage of controllers and there were exceptional winds” of 60 to 70 m.p.h.

After radioing that it needed a priority landing, the Avianca jetliner was forced to abort its first landing attempt after instruments warned it was approaching the runway too steeply. Later, it radioed twice more that it was low on fuel. In the second message, the pilot said two of his four engines had failed. Investigators subsequently determined that all four engines had stopped before the crash.

Further Interviews

Investigators said they would spend today interviewing additional ground controllers at the New York Center in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., where the urgent message was received.

Federal investigators said the plane’s initial flight plan called for 74,000 pounds of jet fuel--enough to provide an extra 90 minutes of flying time on the normally 4-hour and 40-minute journey from Colombia.

The plane was delayed for 89 minutes by weather-related congestion en route--for 16 minutes over Norfolk, Va., for 27 minutes between Norfolk and New York, and for 46 minutes about 40 miles south of JFK.

It was unclear Sunday night whether the shortage of air traffic controllers the night of the crash could be attributed to the residual effects of the firing of striking air traffic controllers by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. However, sources said Sunday that the New York Center and New York TRACON were among the hardest hit in the nation by the strike, and there have been questions about staff levels.

“These facilities were hard hit by the strike and questions about the rebuilding process have been raised,” the source said.

About 18 months ago, Congress passed legislation granting incentives designed to bring more controllers to the New York area.

Earlier in the day, federal investigators said they had completed their scrutiny of the crash site, a wooded hillside in this wealthy suburban community alongside Long Island Sound.

In an effort to add further evidence to the very strong theory that Flight 052 simply ran out of fuel, investigators took apart two of the jet’s four engines, seeking the fuel levels at the time of impact.

Filters Examined

“What they have done this morning is pull the filters, the main filters from the No. 1 and No. 4 engines, and there was very little fuel in those filters,” Dickinson said.

“It is just another piece of information we want to collect to get a better indication about the amount of fuel that was aboard the airplane. We have collected some papers, the paper work that may give us some indication of the amount of fuel that was put on this airplane at Medellin (Colombia) and we also have to determine how much was put on at Bogota (where it originated).”

In their search through the wreckage Sunday, investigators found several more fuel gauges--bringing the number recovered to six. The cockpit’s instrument panels contained eight gauges--one for each of the plane’s seven tanks and an additional gauge to record the total amount of fuel.

However, NTSB investigators stressed that the gauges might not give accurate readings because of the impact of the crash.

The dead, the living and their rescuers were remembered Sunday at church services on Long Island.

At St. Dominic’s Church in Oyster Bay, Father William Donovan told parishioners, including many firefighters, police officers, doctors and nurses who worked at the crash scene Thursday night, that the hand of God had helped them perform their harrowing duties.

“I had to make some decisions that I never want to make again,” said Oyster Bay Fire Chief Tom Reardon, one of the first to arrive at the wooded hillside and who directed the setting up of the triage area. “ . . . I had to tell people that--crass as it may sound--that we have to move the dead people out of the way to get to live people.”