Qualla: 1975 Transporte Aéreo Militar Convair CV-440 crash

1975 Transporte Aéreo Militar Convair CV-440 crash: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AviSaster, CC BY 4.0. The aircraft had 48 seats. On the morning of 27 October 1975, it carried 67 people. Many of them were not soldiers but their wives and their children, packed aboard a military Convair for the short hop from the lowland strip at Tomonoco up toward the thin air of La Paz. They never reached it. About ten minutes after takeoff the pilot radioed that the engines were failing on the climb, and shortly after, the aircraft came down in heavy forest near Caranavi. Everyone aboard died. It remains the deadliest crash in the long history of the Convair CV-240 family, and behind that statistic is something harder to hold: dozens of families that vanished together in a single morning.

Image: AviSaster | CC BY 4.0

1975 Transporte Aéreo Militar Convair CV-440 crash: A Climb That Asked Too Much

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AviSaster, CC BY 4.0. The geography here is unforgiving. The flight began at Tomonoco, an airstrip in the warm lowlands roughly 170 kilometers northeast of the capital, and was bound for El Alto Airport serving La Paz, which sits among the highest of any major city on Earth. To get from one to the oth...

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1975 Transporte Aéreo Militar Convair CV-440 crash: Who Was Aboard

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AviSaster, CC BY 4.0. When the remains were recovered and identified on 27 and 28 October, the human shape of the loss became clear. Of the 63 passengers, around twenty were military officers and six were male civilians. The rest, the majority of the people on that flight, were the officers' wives and...

Image: AviSaster | CC BY 4.0

1975 Transporte Aéreo Militar Convair CV-440 crash: The Search in the Green

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AviSaster, CC BY 4.0. The crash site was steep, heavily forested, and hard to reach, the kind of terrain that swallows wreckage whole. The Bolivian Air Force led the search with fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, and the Gendarmerie and Army joined the effort on the ground. President Hugo Banzer Sua...

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1975 Transporte Aéreo Militar Convair CV-440 crash: What the Forest Holds

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AviSaster, CC BY 4.0. Half a century on, the forested ridges near Caranavi have folded the wreckage into themselves, the way the Yungas always reclaim what falls into them. The road and rail routes that thread these mountains are notorious for their hairpin drops and their sudden fog, and aviation off...

Image: AviSaster | CC BY 4.0