by Glenn Stout
Over the next few days, nothing changes. In the morning, Filipe leaves a love note for Aline on a napkin in the kitchen. When he begins packing for the trip to São Paulo, where Chape will play a Brazilian league game and then, from there, go to Medellín, Colombia, for the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final, Filipe puts their two-year-old daughter, Antonella, up on top of the suitcase as he wheels it around the apartment.
Antonella squeals and grabs her father’s arms. Filipe and Aline talk about the team and the winning and the trip to the Dominican Republic and about Antonella’s love of the problem-solving dogs on the TV cartoon Paw Patrol. As Filipe is about to leave, Aline kisses him and tells him, “Go now, go and take this moment.”
At Tiaguinho and Graziele’s apartment, Tiaguinho puts his bag down by the door and caresses Graziele’s belly. At their wedding, she wore a sleek white gown with a floor-length veil and a headband with crystal butterflies on it and looked like a princess. Now she tells him she hopes she will start having strange cravings soon, like pickles or sausage, instead of just feeling nauseous all the time. He hugs her and talks to the baby, telling it he is going to teach it how to play soccer and take it onto the field with him before a big game someday. Tiaguinho nuzzles Graziele’s stomach before he walks out the door and says, “Love, take care of our little baby.”
Alan Ruschel, a left back for Chape, has a more frenetic departure. A misplaced passport leaves him and his fiancée, Marina, scrambling, and Marina is worried it is some sort of sign, a harbinger about her fiancé’s chance to play well in an important final. But the passport is found, and Alan can leave, and Marina feels an exaggerated sensation of comfort and calm come over her when she is in the shower the next morning. It is an unusual feeling for her; she likes energy and pace. She was in beauty pageants when she was younger and sometimes wears a nose ring and highlights her hair lighter or darker depending on her particular mood. She is working on designing her own clothing line and likes walking the couple’s dog, even though the dog has an affinity for chewing everything from shoes to furniture.
She is not used to serenity. She tells Alan about this feeling, and he chuckles at her. “What do you think it means?” he asks, and she hesitates. She cannot place the sensation; she knows only that it makes her feel warm. “I think something very good is going to happen to you,” she says finally. “I think maybe you are going to score a goal.”
The flight to Medellín takes off at 6:18 p.m. local time. It is delayed slightly because one of the players asks, just as the doors are closing, whether he can get his bag back from the luggage hold. He left his video game player inside. Many jokes are made, but the bag is retrieved.
It is retrieved because this is a charter flight operated by LaMia Airlines and not a regular commercial flight. LaMia is a Bolivian company that has flown many other soccer clubs to important games. Just a few weeks ago, on the same plane, it flew Lionel Messi and the Argentine national team to a World Cup qualifier. A Bolivian airline cannot legally operate a flight from Brazil to Colombia, so the Chape traveling party first takes a commercial flight from São Paulo (where the team loses 1–0 to Palmeiras in that Brazilian league game) to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a Bolivian town. LaMia will then take the team from there to Medellín for the first match of the Copa Sudamericana final against Atlético Nacional.
While waiting for the flight, Alan Ruschel does magic tricks. He correctly guesses which card a teammate picks from the deck and makes a card disappear right in front of everyone’s eyes. Danilo tries some tricks too, but he is better as a member of the audience because he gets visibly startled when Alan suddenly makes the card appear again.
Everyone is giddy. A Bolivian television crew does interviews before departure, and one of the flight crew members says to the camera, “I think we’ll return with good results.” Kempes, the striker, gestures to the crew member and grins, saying, “Everything is fine because he is in charge.” The team used LaMia for a trip earlier in the Copa Sudamericana, and Caio Júnior, the head coach, tells the interviewer that traveling via Bolivia “gives us good luck.”
Once in the air, the players deal cards and play samba. One of the staff members tries to teach a flight attendant Portuguese. Caio Júnior sits up front with most of the coaches. Kempes sits on the right side by a window. Two rows from the back, Rafael Henzel sits in a middle seat among the other journalists. Alan sits next to Follmann, the backup goalkeeper, in the center of the plane; Alan was originally in the rear but moved up when the journalists gathered there. Follmann grabbed him and pulled him into his row.
The flight is long. Some players eat. Some doze. Some keep their headphones on the entire time. At about 9:30 p.m. local time, the plane begins its descent. A different aircraft, flying from Bogotá to San Andrés, has just been diverted to Medellín because of a mechanical issue, so Chape’s flight is directed into a holding pattern. At 9:49 p.m., the pilot on Chape’s flight requests priority to land from the air traffic controller.
In the cabin, Rafael asks a flight attendant when they will be on the ground. Ten minutes. Ten minutes, he is told. He notices that the flight attendant looks worried. At 9:52 p.m., the air traffic controller tells the pilot there is another plane also holding just below them and asks whether they can wait a few more minutes for clearance.
At 9:53 p.m., one of the four engines on the British-made Avro RJ85 plane fails. Thirteen seconds later, the second engine fails. At 9:55 p.m., the third engine fails. Fourteen seconds after that, the fourth engine fails. The lights in the cabin go out, and the air circulator goes quiet. There is no turbulence or shaking; it feels instead as if the plane is floating toward the ground.
Using the standard phonetic alphabet to refer to LaMia’s call letters of LMI, the pilot shouts into his radio at the female air traffic controller: “Señorita, Lima Mike India 2933 is in total failure!”
About 30 seconds later, the pilot calls again: “Lima Mike India, vectors! Vectors, señorita! Vectors to the runway!”
He is asking for directions. The controller answers that the plane has disappeared from her radar. She tries to guide the pilot toward the runway anyway and asks for the plane’s altitude. The pilot shouts, “9,000 feet, señorita. Vectors, vectors!” The controller tells the pilot how far the plane is from the runway. There is a pause. Then the controller hears the word “Jesus” over the radio. She asks again for the pilot to call his altitude, and the radio is silent.
At 9:59 p.m. local time on November 28, the Chape flight, traveling at about 150 miles per hour, crashes into Cerro Gordo, a mountain with an elevation of 8,500 feet. On impact, the plane shears into two pieces. The tail embeds on the south side of the crest. The nose shoots over the edge and finishes on the north side, nearly 500 feet away. One of the engines catches in the branches of an uprooted tree. There is no explosion, no fire at the site, only twisted metal and debris.
The temperature at Cerro Gordo is 66 degrees. There are cloudy skies and thunder in the distance. It is, by most measures, an unremarkable night in Colombia. After traveling four hours and roughly 1,800 miles, Chape’s plane plunges to the ground just 11 miles from the runway at José María Córdova International Airport outside Medellín.
Aline Machado is sleeping, but it is the sleep of a parent with a toddler nearby. When the phone rings in the early morning, she answers it immediately. It is her mother.
At first, Aline does not understand what her mother is saying. Then she hears the words “airplane” and “Chape.” Her head starts pounding. She sits up in bed and turns on the television. There are confusing reports about something happening.
She feels sick. She calls Antonella’s nanny to come over so she won’t be alone. The text-message group of Chape wives and girlfriends buzzes on her phone over and over. No one knows what is going on. No one knows what to believe. One woman says that someone from Colombia has messaged her on Facebook but that she is not sure if it is reliable. The person says there are no fatalities, that it was just
an emergency landing. There is hope. The television and radio voices keep talking but not saying anything for certain. Then the reports begin mentioning “some” survivors, and the phone buzzes more.
Aline believes Filipe is alive. She believes she can feel him. She has known Filipe since they were children. On their first date, he took her to see pigs. Some of her friends thought it was strange, but she understood. The pigs were at a farm his family owned on the outskirts of Gravataí, near Porto Alegre. Filipe imagined that someday he would turn the farm into a soccer field for the community. He would build the locker rooms himself. He would put up goals, and children would come and play. He would run camps and clinics. It would be his to share.
So on that first date, when they were just teenagers, Filipe was showing Aline his dream. She felt his passion, his ambition that day. She felt his enthusiasm. And now, in the middle of the night, she still feels it. When the TV says a defender is among the survivors, she is sure it is Filipe. She is sure of it. When the TV says it is Neto, she is happy because it means one of Filipe’s friends survived too.
She goes to Rosangela’s house. Rosangela is married to Cléber Santana, the captain of the team. Filipe and Cléber Santana are close; when Cléber Santana was substituted late in the game against São Paulo, Filipe took the captain’s armband and finished the game as the team’s leader.
Aline is going to pick up Rosangela, and the two of them will go to the stadium together to wait for more news with the other wives. When Aline comes into Rosangela’s living room, the TV is on. Rosangela is sitting there. Aline looks at her and then looks at the TV and hears the reporter say, “There are no more survivors.” She stares at the TV for a beat or two or three. Then Aline wails and collapses to the ground.
After 20 minutes, Aline and Rosangela collect themselves and go to the stadium. They sit in the locker room with wives and girlfriends and mothers and fathers. Everyone connected to the club has come to the stadium because no one knows where else to go. Even Chiquinho is there. Graziele is hysterical. Someone says, “Be strong, Grazi, for the baby.” A locker room attendant begins to gather the players’ clothing, putting things in bags.
In one corner is Marina. She feels torn. Val, Aline, Rosangela—they are all crying. Marina is crying too, but her fiancé, Alan Ruschel, is alive. The team doctor took Marina aside and told her Alan was in surgery in Colombia. Marina does not know the details of the surgery, but she knows Alan is alive. She tries to comfort her friends, to hold them and hug them, but they know her partner is not dead like theirs. They know she is not left alone, and already it is different.
When the man collecting clothes from the lockers comes around to Alan’s, Marina stops him. He seems confused. She looks around and tries to whisper. “No,” she says under her breath. “No. Don’t take these.”
Rafael Henzel does not know what happened. He does not know where he is, exactly. But he sees lights moving and hears strange voices and tries to call out. “I’m here!” he shouts. “I’m here!”
He calls out for his radio colleague, his friend. “Renan? Renan?” Renan Agnolin, his partner, was sitting next to him on the plane. But Rafael cannot see him anymore. He calls Renan’s name again and again, but there is no answer.
Slowly, Rafael begins to realize there are trees around him. Then he sees faces. There are five or six men. There is a woman. They are talking to him and pulling at his clothes. He yells at them, “Don’t rip my shirt! Don’t cut my trousers!” He is worried he will lose the only change of clothes he has in Colombia. They tell him he is going to be okay, that they are going to help him. One keeps shouting, “Don’t go to sleep, Rafa! Don’t go to sleep!”
Rafael does not know he was in the back piece of the plane, the one that plunged into the soft earth on the near side of the mountain. He does not know that the elevation and the fog and the mud made it impossible for helicopters to land at the crash site, and that it took hours before rescue workers could arrive. He does not know that he will be extracted from the site in the back of a pickup truck because ambulances cannot get to him.
Once he reaches the hospital, he has a vague understanding of what has happened but knows no specifics. He knows the plane crashed, but the doctors do not tell him how many people are dead. He does not know that Alan Ruschel kept asking the doctors, “Where are my friends?” as he was wheeled into surgery. He does not know that Follmann, the backup goalkeeper, will have his leg amputated below the knee or that one physician will describe Neto to a television station as “currently” alive because he does not want to be presumptuous. Rafael does not know that Danilo survived the crash and was rescued, only to die at the hospital.
A day later, Rafael’s wife arrives and traces her finger over his face, where a tree branch or a piece of wreckage has gouged a wound above his right eye. He has a swollen abdomen from his seven broken ribs and a tube down his throat, and he is sedated. She looks at him and says, “I came to get you,” and his eyes grow moist.
She wants Rafael to focus on himself, on his own recovery, so she and the doctors tell him the story in stages. Three days after the crash, Rafael learns that there are only a few survivors. No one tells him about exactly how the plane went down. No one tells him that there are so many coffins in the San Vicente funeral home in Medellín that they have to be kept in the parking garage because there is no room inside. No one tells him that two days of school have been canceled in Chapecó and that residents are holding vigils all day at the stadium and that children have written cards and drawn pictures that are piling up outside the gates. No one tells him the city is in mourning.
On Saturday, five days after the crash, Rafael finally looks at the list, finally reads all the names. That morning, three C-130 Hercules aircraft from the Brazilian air force arrive in Chapecó with all the bodies. The coffins are loaded onto several open-sided box trucks, a dozen or more in each, and driven from the airport to the stadium. Shrouded in white and wrapped in plastic because of the rain, the coffins are carried in by the soldiers.
Chiquinho and his men have set out the flowers and the bunting. They have also left only one set of goalposts on the field—the one Danilo was guarding when he made the save against San Lorenzo that sent Chape to the final. Danilo’s wife places a picture of Danilo in the goalmouth. The godfather of Danilo’s son pounds the crossbar with Danilo’s gloves. Under the tent, Danilo’s mother hugs Filipe’s father and whispers, “Why did he have to make that save in the last minute?”
The president of Brazil is there. The FIFA president is there. Nearly 100,000 people, about half the population of the city, are inside the Arena Condá or directly outside. There is coverage of the memorial all over the world.
There were 77 people on the plane. Twenty-two were Chapecoense players, and three survived. Twenty-three more were coaches or team staff, and there were two team guests. There were 21 journalists, including Rafael, and there was the flight crew, all of whom perished except for one flight attendant and a maintenance technician. Of the 71 who died, there were 64 Brazilians, five Bolivians, one Venezuelan, and one Paraguayan. Fifty coffins come to the wake in Chapecó; the rest are flown elsewhere for separate services.
In the hospital, Rafael does not watch any of the memorial on television. He does not see the stadium’s exterior wrapped in a giant black ribbon. He does not listen to the speeches in which the mayor likens the rain to God’s tears. He can’t bear any of it. It is too fresh. Instead, he just looks at the list, reading the names of his friends over and over.
Aline Machado goes to the airport to see Filipe’s coffin come off the military plane, and then she goes to the stadium. But she does not want to be around people from Chape, does not want to talk about how the club must be força, força, or strong in the face of tragedy. Aline does not want to be strong. She is angry.
She has so many questions, so many things that do not make sense to her. Two stand out: Why did a Brazilian team hire a Bolivian airline to take it to Colombia? And what wa
s the pilot thinking?
Filipe’s father, Osmar, is mad too. Filipe died on Osmar’s birthday, and Osmar cannot stop reading news reports about LaMia and the pilot. Within days, he reads that LaMia was a twice-failed Venezuelan airline whose name was sold to Bolivian investors and relaunched in 2015. He learns that it had three planes and that only one was operational. He learns that the pilot, Miguel Quiroga, was in trouble with the Bolivian air force for leaving his military service early with no explanation. And he learns that Miguel Quiroga was also one of the owners of LaMia.
This infuriates him. He tells Aline, “The pilot is a murderer,” as he hears more and more on television and the radio. Most crashes involve a massive fire because the fuel explodes, but investigators say all the LaMia fuel gauges found in the wreckage were “below zero,” so there was no fire, no explosion. The official flight plan Quiroga filed is scrutinized, and investigators believe that Quiroga might have underreported the weight of the flight. Also, the maximum flying time before fuel ran out—four hours, 22 minutes—was listed as the exact same amount of time as the expected trip time, with no safety buffer for things such as the plane circling the arrival airport to let another plane land in front of it.
Why did the plane crash? Osmar cringes when he says it: it ran out of gas.
The club makes statements about how LaMia had flown other soccer teams in South America and was reputable. There was only a day or two between winning the semifinal and leaving for the trip, it says, so the time to make decisions about the travel plans was short. The team had flown with LaMia earlier in the tournament and had been satisfied. It liked the way LaMia put Chape’s logo on the plane and on the headrests of the seats. Using a charter airline was more efficient as well, the club says, because it meant the team could leave right after the game and get back sooner than if it had to wait for a commercial flight the next day.