1979 pilot suicide in Bogotá

In the 1979 Bogotá pilot suicide, four people died in Bogotá on 22 August 1979 after a mechanic had stolen a Hawker Siddeley HS.748 of the Colombian airline SATENA and steered it into a residential area.

Sequence of events

At around five o'clock in the morning of 22 August 1979, 22-year-old Armando Nieto Jaramillo (born 9 May 1957 in Bogotá), a former non-commissioned officer of the Colombian Air Force, left his flat in the south of Bogotá armed with a .38-calibre revolver. Months earlier, after two years working as a mechanic at the airport, Jaramillo had recently been dismissed following repeated disputes with other employees. At 5:36 he entered the airport grounds of the city's airport.

Jaramillo took advantage of the fact that he had worked for the state airline SATENA in order not to arouse suspicion at the security checks and to get to the company's hangar. He hid among forklift trucks parked on the apron and decided to take the parked Hawker Siddeley HS748 FAC1101, which was scheduled for a flight to Medellín that day and had been fuelled.

When SATENA ground staff shortly afterwards tried to pull another HS748 out of the hangar, they noticed the engines of FAC1101 being started and the aircraft taxiing to the runway. Over the radio Jaramillo spoke the following message to air traffic control:

With some difficulty, Jaramillo managed to perform an unstable, wobbling takeoff without takeoff clearance and with only one engine running. After takeoff he first flew over Avenida Caracas and continued in the direction of Molinos del Sur. His lack of expertise caused Jaramillo to steer the aircraft in the opposite direction to his destination. The aviation technician flew towards the Pasadena neighbourhood in the north of Bogotá, although he intended to fly to the Marco Fidel Suárez neighbourhood, where he lived with his parents. When Jaramillo noticed this, a few minutes later he turned the aircraft away to the south, orienting himself by the hills of Bogotá and Carrera Séptima. Shortly afterwards, at 5:40, the aircraft crashed after an engine failure into a row of houses at Carrera 15, No. 48-37. The accident killed the pilot on board the aircraft as well as three people in the house, including a 17-year-old youth who was taking a shower when he was struck by a propeller, and a 65-year-old woman who had just opened her front door when she was swept off the terrace of her house by the blast of air and suffered fatal injuries.