One aspect of the LANSA story that deserves particular attention is the timeline between the crash and the formal revocation of the airline’s operating certificate.
Flight 508 crashed on December 24, 1971. The Peruvian government revoked LANSA’s operating certificate on January 4, 1972 — eleven days after the crash. By some accounts, the airline had already effectively ceased operations before the revocation: its remaining aircraft were grounded or had been lost in previous accidents, its operational capacity was exhausted, and the crash of Flight 508 had destroyed its last airworthy Electra.
The revocation was, in this reading, the formal confirmation of a situation that already existed rather than an action that stopped a functioning airline. This reading, if accurate, changes the nature of the regulatory question somewhat: it was not that the government acted promptly to shut down a dangerous airline that might otherwise have kept flying. It was that the government formalized the end of an airline that had already destroyed itself through its own accident record.
The practical question — whether LANSA could have been grounded before it crashed three planes and killed more than 240 people — is not answerable from the sources consulted for this article. The regulatory mechanisms that existed in Peru in 1964–1971, and the specific interactions between the airline and the regulatory authorities across those years, are not documented in the English-language sources available to this article. What is documented is the outcome: three crashes, hundreds dead, and an airline that eventually ceased to exist.