Vickers Viscount Crash at Chimboraso

Vickers 785D Viscount with serial number 377 was released in 1958 and on March 11 made its first flight. The liner was assigned an I-LIRS registration number and transferred to the customer, the Italian national airline Alitalia , which he received on March 24. On December 17, 1969, I-LIRS was sold to the Ecuadorian airline SAETA (Sociedad Anonima Ecuatoriana de Transportes Aereos), where after re-registration it received a new HC-ARS onboard number and became the first Vickers Viscount representative there (later the company acquired three more Visconta "). January 29, 1972 was overhauled in the UK at the factory ^[1] .

On the morning of this day, the HC-ARS was carrying out an internal passenger flight LU-232 from Quito to Cuenca , and was piloted by its crew, commander of which was Marcelo Aleman ( Spanish Marcelo Aleman ). The flight route passed in a straight line from north to south with the intersection of the Andes , and the estimated duration was 1 hour ^{[2] [3]} .

Due to heavy rains, the departure was delayed a little more than an hour. Finally, at 08:06, flight 232 with 55 passengers and 4 crew members took off from the strip of the Mariscal Sucre airport (Quito). After completing several turns with climb and rising above the clouds, the crew then headed south to Cuenca. After 21 minutes, at 08:27 from the HC-ARS, they reported the passage of Ambato (60 kilometers south of Quito ) and that the flight was normal at an altitude of 18,000 feet (5500 m ). No more messages from the crew were received and he did not get in touch. The airliner never arrived in Cuenca ^[2] .

When it became clear that the plane had disappeared, his search began. The memory of the history of four years ago was still alive, when on October 13, 1972, the Uruguayan FH-227 with 45 people on board crashed in the Andes. Then 16 people survived, who, according to their own words, had to eat human meat for two months before the rescue services reached the crash site. But in the case of flight 232, such a scenario was considered unlikely. The search for the HC-ARS continued for more than a month, but ended to no avail. The plane, along with 59 people flying on it, was declared missing. At that time in terms of scale it was the largest accident in Ecuador ^{[2] [3]} .

Soon after the disappearance of Flight 232, Colombian media published a version that the ship was hijacked and stolen by militants, or even drug dealers. But since this version was based on unconfirmed rumors, it was rejected. The most common version was that the plane crashed into the Chimboraso volcano, which is halfway between Quito and Cuenca and somewhat off the route. When flying in the clouds (due to rains in the region), flight 232 could deviate from the line of the given path and crash into the mountain slope, after which it was littered with an avalanche that had disappeared from the strike, which hid the wreckage. Also, the liner could fall into the gorge between the volcanoes Tungurahua and Sangay , while collapsing into small fragments that are difficult to see from the air. In addition, there was a version that the pilots decided to bypass the rain clouds from the east and the flight did not take place over the Andes, but over the jungle when a catastrophe occurred, as a result of which the plane fell into the forest, where it was hidden by tree crowns. But due to the lack of evidence, none of these versions could be confirmed ^[2] .

In October 2002, a group of climbers explored a new ascent route to the extinct Chimborazo volcano, which is the highest peak in Ecuador (20,700 feet (6,300 m ) above sea level) and is located 90 miles south of Quito. But on October 17, climbers just 200 meters below the summit unexpectedly stumbled upon frozen human remains, as well as things and pieces of metal sticking out from under the snow. As climber Wilson Rosales later stated in a television interview, the aircraft fuselage was identified in these wrecks. A version was expressed that it was a missing flight 232, but without sufficient evidence this could not be stated for sure ^{[3] [4]} .

In February 2003, a special expedition was equipped with the participation of the military, investigators, as well as civil aviation specialists. On February 17, the group reached the place where the debris was found, where after studying it came to the conclusion that the four-engine Vickers Viscount crashed on the side of the volcano, specifically, the HC-ARS ^{[4] [5]} , which disappeared more than a quarter century ago.

• The crash of the Boeing 737 near Cuenca - the current largest plane crash in Ecuador, also performed the flight "Quito - Cuenca".