AeroPeru Flight 603 was a scheduled Santiago-Lima-Mexico City-Los Angeles-Miami flight which crashed on October 2, 1996.

On October 2, 1996, the Boeing 757 that was flying this route crashed in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, near to Pasamayo , Peru. Shortly after takeoff, the crew were receiving contradictory emergency messages, such as rudder ratio , overspeed , underspeed and flying too low, from the board computer. It was only when one wing touched water that the pilots realized what was really happening. All nine crew members and sixty-one passengers died. Rumors abounded that the crash was caused by sabotage because supposedly the Peruvian Mafia wanted one of the passengers (a prisoner who was being extradited to Argentina) dead. Those rumors were never confirmed. The official leading the Peruvian investigation lost a nephew in the crash.

In fact, as the subsequent investigation proved, the cause of the crash was due to masking tape left over the static ports (particularly necessary for altitude data) — an error by the maintenance crew. This put the pilots in a very confusing situation with conflicting and false flight data, which affected even the ability of ground radar to assist.

The Flight 603 incident led to the demise of AeroPeru, which folded in the late 1990s.

See Also

• Lists of accidents and incidents on commercial airliners

External link

• "Clarín" - Argentinean periodistic investigation about Aeroperu 603 Flight
• Aeroperu 603 Alarms activity from voice recorder