Colombia confirms crashed plane was out of fuel

Preliminary investigations have confirmed that a plane that crashed in the Colombian mountains last month killing 71 people including most of a Brazilian football team was out of fuel, officials said Dec. 26.

The LaMia airlines charter flight crashed just outside Medellin on Nov.28, virtually wiping out the Chapecoense Real football club as they traveled to the biggest match in their history.

Freddy Bonilla, the head of Colombia's civil aviation authority, said investigations indicated the British Aerospace 146 jet had run out of fuel.

That has been the leading theory on the crash ever since a harrowing recording emerged of the pilot radioing the control tower to report a fuel emergency.

The pilots "were aware of the fuel limitations they had at the time. It was neither adequate nor sufficient," Bonilla told a press conference.

However, they did not sound the alarm until several minutes before the crash, he said.

The civil aviations authority said in its investigation that the plan for the flight operated by Bolivia-based charter company LaMia did not meet international standards and a series of human errors had lead to the crash. Among the errors made were the decisions to let the plane take off without enough fuel to make the flight safely and then to not stop midway to refuel.

Neither the company nor Bolivian authorities should have allowed the plane to take off with the flight plan submitted, said Bonilla. He said the agency's preliminary conclusions were based on the plane's black boxes and other evidence.

The plane was overweight by about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds), but that did not appear to have played a "decisive" role, he added.

The BAE 146 Avro RJ85 has a maximum range was 2...