There was a plane crash in northern Colombia: a Beechcraft 1900 plane (a twin-engine turboprop) of the Colombian state company Satena crashed while operating a regional route. Unfortunately, all 15 people on board flight NSE 8849 – 13 passengers and 2 crew members – lost their lives: among them, also a member of parliament running for parliamentary elections next March.
According to the first reconstructions provided by the Colombian authorities, the aircraft took off at 11.42am yesterday 28 January (local time, 5.42pm in Italy) from the Camila Daza airport in Cucuta and was headed to Ocana, where it should have landed around 12.00pm. However, the last contact with air control dates back to 11.54, 12 minutes after departure, as can also be seen in the video below Flightradar.
The remains of the aircraft were found only late in the evening: Colombia’s transport minister confirmed that the plane crashed in a rural area within the municipality of La Playa de Belén, a mountainous region on the border with Venezuela and where armed groups of the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissidents of the former guerrillas of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) still operate today.
At the moment, the causes of the accident have not yet been clarified by the authorities, who have deployed air and ground rescue teams around the area where the last contact was recorded. However, the Satena company made it known that, after losing contact with air traffic control, the aircraft did not activate the emergency locator transmitter (ELT, Emergency Locator Transmitter), a device capable of reporting the position of the vehicle in the event of an accident or a forced landing.
