TAN-SAHSA Flight 414

TAN-SAHSA Flight 414 was a scheduled flight from Juan Santamaría International Airport, San José, Costa Rica, to Toncontín Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with a stopover at Augusto C. Sandino Airport in Managua, Nicaragua, on 21 October 1989. Flown with a Boeing 727-200, the flight crashed into a mountain at 7:30 A.M. local time after the pilots failed to follow a special landing procedure required for the arrival to the airport. The crash killed 131 passengers, leaving 15 survivors (including all three pilots). While 20 passengers initially survived, five died before treatment, due to a delay in rescue personnel because of bad weather. It remains, as of 2025, the worst aviation accident on Honduran soil and in Central America at large; it is also the 15th deadliest involving a Boeing 727.

Flight and accident

The flight was approaching Toncontín Airport when Tegucigalpa ATC cleared the flight for the VOR/DME approach to runway 01. Because of high terrain in the area, the approach uses a series of three step-downs from the initial approach fix of 7500 ft MSL. The crew began a continuous descent from about 7600 ft MSL at about 11 nmi from the airport, rather than following the prescribed step-down procedure, which led to the accident site.

The aircraft's descent profile was well below the published step-down course for the entire approach. The aircraft impacted a mountain known as Cerro de Hula at the 4800 ft MSL elevation, approximately 800 ft below the summit, 4.8 nmi from the Tegucigalpa runway 01 threshold. At impact, the aircraft was in approach configuration.

The plane broke into three sections. The first part (cockpit, first class), contained almost all of the survivors of the accident, due to the close-to-stall, nose high configuration at impact.

The passengers had no warning of the impending collision and therefore no time to react. One survivor, Hernan Madrid, described the incident: "The pilot announced that, in a few minutes, we would arrive in Tegucigalpa. We entered a cloud and the plane began to tremble and came down. Later, explosions were heard." Other passengers were asleep when the crash occurred.