Three major fatal crashes in five years — 1966, 1970, and 1971 — with a combined death toll that included the passengers on all three flights, representing a pattern that was not invisible to people with knowledge of Peruvian aviation. Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke had warned against flying LANSA. His warning was based on a reputation that the airline’s actual record substantiated.
The 1970 crash at Cusco killed 101 people. Flight 508’s crash in 1971 killed 91 people. The death tolls are large in absolute terms and extraordinary in relative terms given the size of the airline and the number of flights it operated.
The investigation into Flight 508 cited “intentional flight into hazardous weather conditions” as a cause — meaning the crew made a decision to continue into the storm rather than divert. Whether that decision was made under explicit schedule pressure from the airline, under the implicit pressure of the holiday and the expectations of passengers who needed to get home for Christmas, or from some combination of factors that included genuine uncertainty about how severe the weather would be, is not fully established. What is established is that the crew flew into conditions that destroyed the aircraft.
On January 4, 1972 — eleven days after the crash — the Peruvian government revoked LANSA’s operating certificate. Flight 508 had destroyed the airline’s last airworthy Lockheed L-188 Electra. Its other aircraft had been lost in previous accidents, retired, or left grounded. The airline had effectively ceased to operate before its certificate was formally revoked. It never flew again.