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Aerotransportes Entre Rios Flight 501/90

27 Sept 1975 · Miami International Airport, United States

Canadair CL-44 · Runway excursion due to unreleased control lock

From Miami International Airport (MIA) to Ezeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)

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Event

Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
Accident
InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
Unknown
Event fatalities
6 · all aircraft and ground
Ground fatalities
0
Occupants
Unknown
Survivors
4
InjuriesFatal: death within 30 days. Serious: over 48 hours in hospital within a week, most broken bones, severe bleeding, nerve or organ damage, or serious burns. Minor: anything less. Glossary
5
OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
Airline
WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
Visual Meteorological Cond

Canadair CL-44

Aircraft type
Canadair CL-44
Category
Airplane
RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
LV-JSY
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From Miami International Airport (MIA)To Ezeiza International Airport - Ministro Pistarini (EZE)
Aircraft age
Not recorded
Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
Part 121: Air carrier (scheduled international cargo service)
Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
Takeoff · rejected takeoff
Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
Collided with ditches
DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
Destroyed

Cause areas

  • Miscellaneous acts, conditions › Gust locks engaged
  • Personnel › Inadequate preflight
  • Pilot in command › Inadequate preflight preparation and/or planning

Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Miami, FL, the place the record names. Not the accident site.

From the Wikipedia article

Aerotransportes Entre Rios Flight 501/90 (flight number: RS501/90) was an intercontinental cargo flight of the Argentine cargo airline Aerotransportes Entre Rios on 27 September 1975. On that day a Canadair CC-106 Yukon, which was to fly to Panama City, crashed on takeoff from Miami International Airport. Six of the ten people on board the aircraft were killed in the accident.

Accident sequence

Before departure the crew filed a flight plan stating that the flight to Panama City would be conducted under instrument flight rules. At 05:55 the aircraft received taxi clearance for runway 27L at Miami Airport. The takeoff run began at around 6:00 in the morning, in darkness (sunrise in Miami that day was at 07:11), in visual meteorological conditions. The takeoff run initially appeared normal, but on reaching rotation speed the aircraft did not lift off. Two to three seconds later the captain initiated a rejected takeoff by activating the thrust reversers and applying the wheel brakes. The aircraft overran the end of the runway, collided with the ILS antennas and broke through the airport fence. The aircraft rolled 879 feet beyond the runway across a lawn before it rolled over the Perimeter Road outside the airport and fell into a drainage canal located beyond it, between the Inner Perimeter Road and the Outer Perimeter Road. In the process the forward fuselage section was torn off and slid across the Outer Perimeter Road, where it collided with a parked VW bus, whose occupant was injured. The aircraft caught fire after the impact and burned out completely.

Investigation and cause

Causes

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigated the incident. The accident report was published on 10 March 1976. In it the investigators determined that the cause of the accident was the execution of the takeoff run without first removing a makeshift wooden control lock on the elevator, which was attached to the right Flettner tab. The elevator therefore could not be moved into the position required for lift-off.

The control lock was not one of the aircraft's certified assemblies. The CL-44 was equipped at the factory with a hydraulic control lock system, but after an air accident in 1970 this was either modified or deactivated on most aircraft of this type, after it had been found that the accident aircraft had crashed after the control lock system had activated itself in flight. Aerotransportes Entre Rios was one of the airlines that deactivated the system. It used makeshift external wooden control locks, which were attached to the control surfaces by the crew between flights.

Translated into English with AI assistance from the German Wikipedia article “Aerotransportes-Entre-Rios-Flug 501/90” (revision 258113637, retrieved 2026-09-19) by its authors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted as plain text: references, tables, images and some sections are left out; the translation may contain errors, and long articles were cut to their first 700 words. Read the article

NTSB remarks

HYD ACTUATOR REMOVED.OPERATOR USED MANUAL EXTERNAL LOCK,NOT CERTIFICATED BY MFG.OPERATOR-AER.

NTSB's remark from its 1962–1981 archive, as recorded (abbreviated, at most 98 characters): the archive has no narrative

Sources

German Wikipedia article: Aerotransportes-Entre-Rios-Flug 501/90
Article
Aerotransportes-Entre-Rios-Flug 501/90
Translation
Into English with AI assistance; names of linked operators and aircraft types from Wikidata. It may contain errors.
Revision
258113637 · 2025-07-21 · retrieved 2026-09-19
Wikidata
Q97610768
Licence
Text CC BY-SA 4.0, by the article's authors; Wikidata CC0; town positions GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
NTSB record
Event ID
19750927P061438
Case number
Unknown
Dataset
historical-pre1982
Source SHA-256
abe1a933b4b73583d61684309f7f0610c281e3c1de3537c6471bf2a98ba6481d
Where each value comes from
Record
de Wikipedia article "Aerotransportes-Entre-Rios-Flug 501/90" (page 11300151, revision 258113637), translated into English with AI assistance; merged with NTSB case NTSB19750927P061438 (PRE1982 tblFirstHalf (one row per aircraft, grouped by date, place and time))
Date
NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438: PRE1982 DATE_OCCURRENCE
Place and country
Wikipedia infobox: site; country from NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438
Map position
NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438: centre of the town the record names (GeoNames, CC BY 4.0)
Aircraft, operator and route
NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438: PRE1982 REGIST_NO, ACFT_MAKE, ACFT_MODEL; gaps from Wikipedia infobox: aircraft type, registration, operator, origin and destination; route airports from the linked airport articles' Wikidata codes (OurAirports)
Operation
NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438: operated under Part 121: Air carrier (scheduled intl cargo service)
Fatalities
NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438: PRE1982 TOTAL_ABRD_FATAL of each aircraft, plus people on the ground and others outside the aircraft
Ground fatalities
NTSB record NTSB19750927P061438: events.inj_f_grnd
Summary
Wikipedia article lead
Source notes (4)
  • One occurrence in two sources, merged: the Wikipedia article "Aerotransportes Entre Rios Flight 501/90" and NTSB case NTSB19750927P061438, matched by the same aircraft registration and date. For this US event the NTSB's values are used where the two differ; each value names its source.
  • From NTSB's 1962-1981 archive (PRE1982), which holds at most a short remark (98 characters, abbreviated) instead of a narrative; the accident type, phase of flight, causes and conditions are NTSB's codes, decoded as the archive defines them.
  • Reviewed means this record passed the site's consistency check, not that it was checked against a narrative or report - there is none to check against.
  • The operation category is mapped from the archive's operator and operation codes and has not been reviewed.