Tame resumes Cuenca-Guayaquil flights on Monday; Pilot error responsible for 2016 accident, report says

Cuenca’s Marsical La Mar Airport authority announced Saturday that Tame Airlines will resume Cuenca to Guayaquil service on Monday with an afternoon flight. The government-owned airlines suspended flights in April, saying that low passenger demand made the route unprofitable.

Tame will resume Cuenca-Guayaquil flights Monday.

Ecuador’s Deputy Minister of Public Works and Transport Boris Palacios, who attended the announcement, said that schedule details remain to be worked out but that Tame would fly at least one morning and one afternoon flight between between Cuenca and Guayaquil, Monday through Saturday.

The resumption of flights is based on an agreement between the airline, the Cuenca Chamber of Commerce and the city to guarantee that flights costs are covered.

Meanwhile on Friday, the city received the final Accident Investigation Board (IABA) report of the April 28, 2016 Tame accident at the Cuenca airport, in which a Tame jet skidded off the runway after landing. The report placed primary blame on the pilots.

Reacting to the report, Cuenca Mayor Marcelo Cabrera his interest is ensuring airport safety for the future. “I am not concerned at this time with assigning blame for events that happened more than a year ago,” he said. “We have made upgrades at the airport following the accident and have plans for major expansion within three years.”

The airport was closed for 30 days in August and September 2016 while the runway was resurfaced. The closure was ordered based on the preliminary civil aviation conclusion that the main cause of the accident was the poor condition of the runway surface. The runway was wet at the time of the accident.

While the final accident report says that slippery runway conditions were a contributing factor, poor decisions by the pilots was the main cause. The report said that the pilots ignored precision approach path indicator (PAPI) warning signals and made erroneous aircraft weight calculations. In addition, the report concluded that the aircraft approached at an unacceptably steep angle and at excessive speed.

It also said that the pilots lacked proper training for wet weather landings.

There were no serious injuries as a result of the accident, The Tame Embraer 190 jet carried 92 passengers and crew.