ARGENTINA: Whistleblower’s Film Delves into Tragic Plane Crash

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 4 2005 (IPS) - A film by a pilot-turned-filmmaker that seeks to shed light on a tragic plane crash has won eight national and international prizes as well as strong reviews by critics, while having a major impact on the public.

The film “Whisky, Romeo, Zulu” (for the initials – WRZ – of the Boeing 737 that crashed on Aug. 31, 1999) is the work of Enrique Piñeyro, a former pilot in the private airline involved in the crash.

Piñeyro, a whistleblower who repeatedly complained about and even publicly denounced the company’s poor safety record, was under great pressure in the LAPA airline until he finally resigned just three months before the crash, which he describes as an avoidable tragedy.

He wrote the screenplay for the film, in which he himself appears, and which he produced, directed and shot.

Every night since its mid-April premiere, Piñeyro has been present at the downtown Buenos Aires movie theatre where it is being shown, hanging around afterwards to answer the public’s questions about the crash and the subsequent investigation.

Just three months after Piñeyro handed in his resignation in May 1999, a LAPA Boeing 737 crashed as it tried to take off from the Jorge Newbery airport in Buenos Aires.

The passenger jet rose less than half a metre off the ground before bouncing across the busy Costanera roadway, running into several cars, and ploughing into mounds of dirt near a golf course, where it burst into flames. Sixty-seven of the 105 passengers and crew members aboard were killed.

“I had a large number of documents that demonstrated that LAPA operated with inadequate safety measures, and also proved the complicity of the Air Force, which was in charge of oversight,” Piñeyro commented to IPS during an interview after the film’s premiere.

“I took all that material to a prestigious law firm, but they told me that until a plane actually crashed, nothing could be done,” said the pilot, who is also a medical doctor and air safety specialist.

So he held on to the documents, and handed them over to the justice system three days after the crash, thus becoming a key witness in the investigation which had initially focused on the possibility of pilot error.

Six former LAPA executives and three aeronautic officials have been prosecuted in the investigation of the crash of LAPA airlines flight 3142, and are currently awaiting the “oral” phase of the trial.

Piñeyro had flown planes for LAPA for 11 years before he quit under the pressure he suffered at the hands of his superiors as a result of his whistleblowing activities.

The last straw in his clash with the airline authorities was an article he wrote in the local daily Clarín, in which he warned of the serious danger that an “avoidable tragedy” would occur, due to the company’s poor safety standards.

In 2000, he began to write the screenplay for a film that would give a full account of events prior to the crash of Flight 3142.

“I felt the need to direct it myself, and to act in it too,” he said. He finished the film in 2003, and it became a hit at a number of international film festivals before its commercial release.

It won the Golden Sun Award at the Biarritz International Film Festival in France and the Audience Award at the International Film Festival in Buenos Aires, while Piñeyro’s performance took a prize at the Viña del Mar festival in Chile.

The film shows the pressure that the company put on its pilots, as well as its adamant denial of safety glitches. Aircraft captains who cancelled flights because of mechanical problems were punished, and there were some pilots, including the one who died in Flight 3142, who continued to fly after failing flight simulator tests.

Piñeyro also succeeds in creating a level of realism that not all films on airplane accidents achieve. The scenes in the cockpit were filmed in such a way that the audience feels like it is actually flying, which is at times exhilarating and at other times horrific.

“LAPA had a culture in which aberrations actually became the norm,” said Piñeyro. The film shows how pilots were sometimes forced to take off while ignoring alarms, which often went off by mistake, with empty fire extinguishers, or without the necessary instructions from the ground during bad weather.

In Piñeyro’s view, “there is no difference” between the LAPA crash and the Dec. 30, 2004 catastrophe in the República Cromañon discotheque in Buenos Aires, where 193 concert-goers died in a fire in the overcrowded club where the safety violations included emergency exits that were chained shut.

“Companies’ greed for profits, negligence, the lack of state controls, corruption, the scant value put on people’s lives – all of these factors are endlessly repeated in successive tragedies in Argentina,” said the pilot-cum-filmmaker, who specialised in the investigation of air accidents at the University of Southern California.

Piñeyro said the way LAPA operated was so chaotic that he actually had to leave out a number of true but incredible details because they were so outrageous that they would have hurt the film’s credibility.

Shortly before the release, two unidentified armed individuals entered Piñeyro’s office and carried away computers, cell phones and money, right in front of him and nine other people.

“You know you’re doing things you shouldn’t be doing,” one of them told Piñeyro, putting a gun to the filmmaker’s head.

After that incident – which according to Piñeyro only helped publicise the film – he decided to hold the opening in Córdoba, the city where the ill-fated LAPA flight 3142 was headed.

Most of those who died in the crash, along with their families and the 38 survivors, live in Córdoba, which is located in the central province of the same name.

“We didn’t want the premiere to be merely a fashionable event. So when the families of the victims invited me to hold it in Córdoba, the actors and I went there,” said the director.

The result was extremely emotional. Piñeyro was particularly moved by the reactions of the movie-goers, who came up afterwards to introduce themselves, explain their relationship with the victims, and thank him for telling their story.